Thank you for looking at powerful measures to make Bodø an even more attractive place to make your home, both privately and as a business.
My girlfriend and I are moving from Oslo to Bodø this May, to live close to family - not as a result of a superior job market: But imagine how cool it would be if the best technology jobs were up north!?
When you now look at the reduction in wealth tax, I hope you also have an eye on the problems surrounding startups, which have been thoroughly covered over time by the newspaper Shifter:
In short, the issue is this: Startup founders can sit with large fortunes on paper, long before they get significant turnover, and years before profits. This means that the most ambitious would do well to leave the country even before they get investors. What if they just had to move a few degrees of longitude north?
My wish is that you can see Bodø's position and opportunities in context when you complete this inquiry, so that this will also be a stimulator for existing and future technology initiatives.
Technology workers are mobile, nature loving people, in search of strong communities. Here, Bodø makes a strong case, and stronger with each passing year, with direct flights to the east via Helsinki, a new UiT location, and an already strong technology sector. If a would-be founder can also calculate that over time he will be left with a larger share of his own company, Bodø is the obvious choice.
"
Following this, I have been invited to meet with the mayor(!) The problem is that I am neither a founder or an economist.
If you want to help me present a strong case either towards the main policy of a reduction or removal of the municipal wealth tax, or towards other actions that could synergize to help make Bodø the tech/ startup capital of Norway, please write below!
If for some reason you haven't already, I highly suggest that you remove any pictures of yourself from the internet. Things are going to get real ugly.
The Cincinnati area has Northgate, Eastgate, and Southgate, all three of which are in the locations you'd expect from the names, but Southgate is apparently named after the Southgate family, not because it's to the south of the city.
The cake has nothing German in it. It's like Vienna sausages which are called "Frankfurter" in Vienna. Or the jelly doughnuts "Berliner" which are called "Pfannkuchen" in Berlin https://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/runde-4/f03/ which is weird because that means "pancake", whereas pancakes are called "Eierkuchen" (egg cake) in Berlin. Uh, I seem to have digressed a bit...
I know. That's why I called Outerbridge Crossing a "serendipitous eponym": by chance, the name that inspired the eponym is appropriate for the thing being named.
By contrast, German chocolate cake is merely a "surprise eponym", because people will be surprised when they learn the name is an eponym, rather than a name along the lines of Swiss cheese or English muffins.
Funny how eponyms are often not used in the place they're named after. English muffins are called just "muffins" in England. They can be used for French toast, which is called "pain perdu" (lost bread) in France. And I bet Americans aren't aware of the sugar-coated sweet cake "Amerikaner": https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerikaner_(Geb%C3%A4ck)
Americans do eat "American cheese", while calling it such. And to preempt the obvious, it melts more cleanly that most cheddar, which is important in some contexts.
Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are readily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
Putin just endorsed Biden. "Stable" and "predictable".
I hadn't realized that he was this much of a **troll**. I can't quite picture Putin giggling; maybe he smirks, or just stares with a blank deadpan expression.
Huh, I'd seen the interview billed as "let's actually ask Putin why he invaded Ukraine", so I wasn't expecting hardball questions. I do like this Putin quote:
> "He tried to interrupt me several times, but still, surprisingly for a Western journalist, he turned out to be patient and listened to my lengthy dialogues, especially those related to history, and didn’t give me reason to do what I was ready for. So frankly, I didn’t get complete satisfaction from this interview."
I came here to say that I'm thinking of voting for Robert Kennedy. (I guess I first have to work to get him on the ballot.) His take on Biden is blistering, and he would destroy him in a debate... like that matters.
Heck, he might even make it (which, of course, would make it a *classic* troll - saying something you actually mean, but in a way guaranteed to get a rise). As much as fervent pro-Russia types have been claiming that Biden has a secret plan to take US directly to WW3 Any. Day. Now, under Biden - a traditional cold war prez - the rules of the game are clear; US is participating in a proxy war, but it stays a proxy war. Money flows in, weapons (under certain, though shifting limits) flow in, intel flows in, probably a limited amount of hush-hush special ops persons have flown in - but US troops, as a large-scale deployment, stay out.
Trump does mean uncertainty. Maybe he'd pull everything out? Maybe he'd go all in? Maybe he'd start a war in some completely unexpected location or do a Nixon in China, with China? Who knows?
Hey, that's just what would make it even *more* unexpected. It was, after all, extremely unexpected already that Nixon, with a reputation for strong anti-communism, would court China. No-one would have expected Trump to court Kim Jong Un, of all people.
True. Nixon’s well known anti communism reputation was key for domestic acceptance of detente with China. Kissinger briefed Nixon for over 40 hours prepping for the initial meetings with Zhou and Mao Zedong. It was bold but carefully prepared and carefully executed diplomacy
I’m not sayings Trump wouldn’t stage an impulsive and self aggrandizing photo op. I just don’t think anything meaningful would come of it.
Yeah, a big part of the problem with the North Korea "summits" was that there was basically zero prep work on the American side. Trump walked in with a proposal that Kim absolutely wasn't going to accept, and didn't have a fallback position when Kim didn't go for it.
I would expect more of the same from any Trump summits in a hypothetical second term.
I think it is good that multiple ways exist to pay for online content. Some videos have ads, some authors have Patreon accounts, some people use their free content as an advertisement for their paid content.
But some people just do everything at the same time -- for example a YouTube video that contains ads from YouTube *and* in the middle of the video there is an ad for a third party *and* at the end of the video there is an ad for author's paid videos on a different website *and* there is a link to author's Patreon account.
Are these people completely shameless? Or is everyone else stupid for leaving a lot of money on the table? Speaking for myself, I wouldn't send a cent to a person who seems so greedy. But I am not a typical internet user; other people might enjoy being abused.
These people are shameless whores, but every one of us is either willing to be a sellout or so close as to make little difference, that it's hypocritical for 99% of us to judge too harshly.
I think a lot of it comes down to knowing your audience. Some people can get away with multiple forms of income from the same video - maybe their viewers love them or maybe they don't have any steady viewers and so milk whoever they can get.
Unfortunately, as streaming services and places like YouTube add more and more advertisements and other monetization, it gets easier and easier for people to add their own and not get pushback on it. It becomes expected like broadcast TV in the 90s. Who knows, maybe we'll get accustomed to taking bathroom breaks during commercials like we did in those days.
On Youtube, you can skip in-video ads by just pressing the "skip 10 seconds key" repeatedly or clicking on the timeline. It's a lot less obnoxious than the linear TV era.
At least in some cases, creators have started doing promotions because they can't rely on ad income anymore due to arbitrary demonetization.
Having shame is stupid, so both are true. Never deny customers an opportunity to give you money. Because someone is always going to stupid enough to pay for it.
I'm a soon to be 4th year med student and will soon have more time on my hands as rotations calm down. I also have a couple bachelor's degrees (though not super useful ones), decent scientific writing ability, rudimentary stats skills, and significant research experience. However, I can't code unless you count basic R.
Does anyone have thoughts on ways I could earn some money in the next year? I will still have obligations during the week days but a lot of free time in evenings and weekends. The two options I see floated a lot are tutoring and gig economy work. However, I'm too far removed from my prior MCAT tutoring to go back to that, and even if my soon to be released Step 2 score is excellent, there doesn't seem to be much demand for step tutoring. As far as Doordash, I do have a car but it doesn't pay well as far as I can tell. ChatGPT wasn't much help.
Wouldn't count tutoring out until you try and find some work. Especially if you've done it before. Maybe through an agency would be easiest. Could even do SAT tutoring if your scores were good. I say that because, for what it is, it can be extremely high paying. If you can get any work it'll pay a lot better than gig economy would.
tough spot to be in. I was just there a few years ago. I have no direct input as far as gigs to take up. But i will say if you're going to residency, you could also just not optimize too much on money and make quality memories/rest. As a resident myself now (I like residency btw), beyond basic comforts money has little use when you work an average of 70 hours a week.
Well I just guess we're going to have to wait and see whether this becomes (a) the only story that the media covers for the next three months or (b) buried on page 12 under "local crime".
Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting on a shooting at a Super Bowl parade in Kansas City. This, too, will either be the big news story of the month or forgotten within an hour depending on the colour of the perp's skin.
And I wonder why the police haven't listed anyone as a person of interest...
What was really interesting was this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSgo3bW3r14 of Biden pausing for 20 seconds and quietly consulting Jill before answering a reporter's question "Do you have any reaction to the shooting in Kansas City?" before refusing to answer.
The police have arrested two suspects, both of whom are juveniles so we won't be getting names or photos for a while. This seems to have been a case of "gangbanger with a gun sees rival gangbanger in a crowded public place, ballistic mayhem ensues", so it's not going to fit the usual mass-shooter narratives.
Can anyone recommend good Supreme Court Journalists or bloggers? Preferably ones that focus on the legal argument and do not just talk about about the practical effects the decisions will have on people. Preferably minimal political bias.
I am also interested in other answers, but this is the best that I've managed to find:
(1) scotusblog: pretty much "just the facts"
(2) popehat report: Ken White, former federal prosecutor's blog about the law and big cases in the news. I don't read it regularly, but he was historically very balanced in his blog writing (tweets not so much). Not specifically SCOTUS focused.
(3) Advisory Opinions: David French and Sarah Isgur. Note: they are biased from the right, but they claim a mantle of objectivity. I do think they are making a sincere effort, so partly this shows how difficult it is to be objective. Aside from their political spectrum bias, they are strongly pro-SCOTUS as an institution.
(4) Strict Scrutiny: Melissa Murray, Kate Shaw, Leah Litman. Openly biased from the left, but, like AO, they explain their reasoning. They are moderately anti-SCOTUS as an institution, primarily driven by their opposition to the court's current members.
(5) 5-4 Podcast: Rhiannon Hamam, Peter Shamshiri, Michael Liroff. Strongly anti-SCOTUS as an institution (and not just the current justices).
Do any of the new image generators / alterers allow you to upload pictures of yourself or another person at different ages, and have it adjust different-age pictures to a requested age?
Like you have a picture of your grandma at age 20 and age 90, can it impute a picture of her at age 50?
Or a picture of yourself ten years ago vs today - can you age the younger picture to you today, keeping the background and setting?
Here's a geometry problem that may be a bit challenging, but fun to think about and doodle. I know of two solutions, one of which is strikingly simple.
Consider a convex quadrilateral. Label its sides a,b,c,d in clockwise order, and let its area be S. Prove that S <= (ac+bd)/2.
Well, I think that the cross product of two vectors (which is ||v1||*||v2||*|sin(v1,v2)| gives the area inside the parallelogram defined by these two vectors. Dividing it by 2, we get the area of the triangle defined by v1 and v2. As |sin(v1,v2)| <= 1, we get your inequality. I guess its the strikingly simple proof, but nice problem indeed, it distracted me a bit from my job!
Well, let's take the S <= (ab+cd)/2 for granted and apply it to the a,c,b,d quadrangle. We can now write S2 <= (ac+bd)/2. Now, if I read Bretschneider's formula right (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretschneider%27s_formula), it seems like a quadrangle's area is totally determined by its sides (which are fixed in our case), and the sum of two opposed angles (which can usually be tuned to the optimal 180°, except for edge cases). So it looks like the maximal area of quadrangle is unchanged by the order you put the segments in.
So S2max = Smax <= (ac+bd)/2. And as S <= Smax, we get to the desired result.
The edge case aforementioned only seems to concern quadrangles with a null area. And the inequality stands in that case too.
I am not very satisfied with my answer as I am using a formula that carries a lot more information than what is needed to prove your inequality.
Edit:
In fact, no need for this fancy formula. Let's take an "optimal quadrangle", ie one which area is maximal, given its sides. We can break it in two "optimal" triangles. If we permute two sides, we can still reform this optimal triangle, only mirrored: the area is unaffected. That's how we can prove that the maximal area of a quadrangle only depends on the length of its sides, not their order.
The fellowship has been impactful for many participants, and I expect there are many others who would enjoy and benefit from the program if they heard about it!
Maybe, but I'll bet "EA for Christians" is almost entirely composed of actual Christians, whereas "EA for Jews" is almost entirely composed of atheists.
Is there any way to disable the substack subscribe pop-up? I've noticed this site does not have the pop up either for the main page or the individual articles. However I cannot find instructions on how to turn it off anywhere on the internet? (edit I have figured out how to turn it off the individual articles, but is there any way to remove it from the main page without linking to the archive)
This drives me crazy too. Every single time I want to read a non-ACX Substack post, I first have to scroll down until the screen goes dark and the popup appears, click X on the popup, and then scroll back up and actually read the damn article. It's insane.
Use uBlock origin (which you should be using anyway) and use the select and block feature. Removes anything on a webpage that you don't want to see. This is the only place I'd advertise this extension because it's so good that if it gets too popular, our lizard overlords will ensure it gets shut down.
Because I live and work in the world, around other people. I talk to them about tech stuff, and ad blockers come up. Do you do that? I don't work in the tech industry.
Is there a way to check your post history? I was banned from a particular Substack and I have no real idea why. I only discovered it recently, presumably quite a ways after the fact, since I don't post on their Substack much. I am curious if, in fact, the individual in question didn't even ban me for posts on their own Substack, but it was one of those bans you see on Reddit sometimes where it's because they said something you don't like elsewhere.
Add mine to the litany of complaints about substack lacking the most fucking basic of functional forum features. This is local grocery store app level embarrassing.
I tried to imagine an explanation for why - assuming Substack has adequate money and technical talent - none of this gets fixed:
Maybe Substack doesn't want to make commenting more pleasant, because it would encourage more comments. Then, writers might find themselves doing more moderating and more responding, and thus write fewer new posts. But Substack probably thinks paid subscriptions are mainly caused by posts, rather than commenting. (As with most online communities, commenters here are a minority of subscribers.)
I sometimes think that the comment section was designed for a single level of "yay, you rock" comments, with an optional second layer of "thanks for reading".
Substack *only displays two comments* by default, so that seems accurate. Still, you'd think they could try to fix things for one of their biggest stars.
Agreed. Maybe we should try to do something about it?
I never thought I'd use 'my substack' for anything, but decided I might as well create a post on it, to initiate collaboration around the issue. Anyone who's interested, click on my profile image to get to it.
Does anyone know what's up with polymarket's US election market? With Michelle Obama at 7% and thousands of dollars on the order book, it seems too much like free money. What's the catch?
Currently Michelle Obama is 7.1% to be the next president on Betfair Exchange (£10m bet on the market; £360k on this candidate). She is also 10.2% to be the democratic nominee (£7m bet on the market; £190k on this candidate), which implies she has a 70% chance of winning if nominated. Both figures are based on the odds at which you could bet against her. If you think neither event will occur, you probably prefer to get an 11% return in 6 months than a 7% return in 10 months.
Alternatively, you could back Biden. His odds have shortened slightly in the past two days, but still imply a 69% chance he will be the nominee (with a chunky £5.8m of bets on this candidate), which you may think low. His implied chance of being the next president is 28% (with £2.9m of bets). This implies he as a 41% of winning if nominated. These figures are based on the odds at which you could bet for him.
Meanwhile, Trump (according to this market) is 91% likely to be the Republican nominee and 45% likely to be the next president, implying a 49% chance of winning if nominated.
Something looks wrong with those conditional probabilities, since in each case their most likely opponent is the other. Possibly worth considering backing both Trump and Biden to win: if you put £387 on Biden and £613 on Trump, you would make £373 (before commission) if either won, although of course you get rinsed if Michelle pulls through.
The reason we got Biden as a candidate, and then a president, is that almost all the people who weren't on the Trump Train fondly remembered the Obama presidency, and Biden's "I was the #2 man in the Obama administration; I can give you a calmer, more sedate Obama Lite" sold better than the specific pitches of any of the other Democratic candidates.
If Biden is out because of age/senility/whatever, which is probably north of 7%, then that leaves us with the #1 woman in the Obama administration, and probably the only other figure from that administration that most voters can remember off the top of their head. And "Four more years of Obama Lite; the alternative is four more years of The Donald", is probably almost as strong a pitch now as it was in 2020.
But Biden could back that with actually being an experienced, capable politician. Michelle can't, and I'm pretty sure that *will* matter. So I think she's overpriced at 7%, but I think I can see where that 7% is coming from.
Wasn't Hillary Clinton the #1 woman in the Obama administration, as Secretary of State? I believe that voters also remember her.
I don't think that anyone who is actually thinking about governance is considering Michelle Obama as a candidate here - they're just picking a name they think of based on thoughts like the First Lady counting somehow as part of the government.
Hillary wasn't in the administration at all during Obama's second term. And whether she was in the Senate, State, or on the lecture circuit, she was always the #1 woman in the Hillary Clinton Administration, on hold until it was Her Turn.
If they were going to replace Biden, the time to do that would have been *before* the primaries. People dropped a lot of stalking horses a year or two ago, but it never went anywhere. The only way he can not be the candidate now is if he literally drops dead.
The latest thinking, by Ross Douthat among others is that Biden waits till the convention to say something like “I could do the job but I’ve heard the will of the people.”
Then bow out for the good of the party and the country, letting all his pledged delegates come up with a replacement. He wouldn’t necessarily have to endorse Kamala Harris in that situation.
Conditional on it not being Biden, I'm seeing probabilities around:
Obama, 33%
Newsom, 28%
Harris, 20%
Warren, 5%
Whitmer, 4%
Phillips, 3%
Clinton, 2% (although I note that Clinton is much higher on PredictIt).
If the scenario is that Biden drops out at the convention, I'm confident Obama is much too high and Harris is much too low. But mostly, I think that won't happen (barring some major adverse event between then and now, the probability of which is well below 33%).
I had the same reaction 4 years ago, when a left-wing friend was breathlessly talking about the possibility of Michelle Obama running for President against Trump. I was completely disconnected from politics at the time, and reacted with obvious befuddlement, since she wasn't a politician and had no experience and her only qualification was being married to a guy who'd done it (which seemed profoundly anti-feminist). I forget exactly what my friend said in response, but I recall the expression on their face was as if no one had ever mentioned these objections to them. The subject was quietly dropped.
I eventually concluded that this friend had been listening to politics in an echo chamber, with some combination of a) starting to mistake the reactions in there for reactions in the outside world, and b) assuming that I was part of the same echo chamber (although they really should have known better, so that would be another form of blindness). Perhaps it was c) code for "let's let Barack run things for another 8 years", although I didn't detect any hint of that at the time, and in that case the expression might have meant "I thought you'd gotten the secret memo, but alas, you're literal-minded enough to miss the hidden meaning, which I am unwilling to say aloud".
I suspect that something like (a) is happening here, coupled with a norm within that group of putting your money where your mouth is (which is admirable).
> her only qualification was being married to a guy who'd done it (which seemed profoundly anti-feminist)
That sounds like taking proclaimed ideas too literally, which may be appreciated at places like ACX, but at most other places something qualifies as "anti-feminist" only when it is (a) bad for some woman, preferably an important one, or (b) good for her, but in a way that makes her focus less on her career and more on her family.
Yeah, I'm old-fashioned that way, and this is one of those "first-wave" things. I think it counts as anti-feminist to treat a woman purely as an extension of her husband.
Hillary Clinton was a great example. Love her or hate her, it's because of who she was and what she did.
As far as I can see the reasoning (as articulated by Vivek Ramaswamy and others) is (a) Biden's mental faculties are declining, (b) the Democrats will at some point realise they need to replace him, (c) the obvious substitute would be Kamala Harris, but nobody likes her, (d) the Democrats would alienate their base if they overlooked a woman of colour, but (e) they can avoid this by nominating another woman of colour, i.e. Michelle Obama; in any case (f) they really want to run Barack again, but are prevented from doing so by the term limit and (g) Michelle can serve as a de facto cipher for her husband. How this could be done in practice is left as an exercise for the reader.
Some say the switch will take place after the convention, in which case betting against Obama (or for Biden) as nominee is still profitable, since the market will resolve when the convention takes place.
It should be obvious, but I do not endorse any of propositions (a)-(g). I merely report the argument as I have understood it.
There are rumors that the Democrats will switch from Biden to Obama at the convention. I've only heard this from Republican sources, not Democrats, so ... grain of salt, and all that.
Andrew Sullivan just wrote about it, so it's more than just the right-wing media, but I think those odds are overblown. Take the free money; lots of people on betting sites overreact to news stories.
I think there were good reasons for the Dems to try to move off Biden 6-12 months ago, his poll numbers certainly aren't what you'd hope for, but at this point the only way I can figure trying to replace him on the ticket is if he's actively declining. Like,
If Nov 23, he's at X brain farts/gaffes
In Feb 24, he's at 2X brain farts/gaffes
In Aug 24, he'll be at 8x brain farts/gaffes
If you're looking at that kind of decline in an 80+ year-old...yeah, pulling him from the ticket makes sense. That's the only way I can see him not being the Dem nominee though.
There are definitely rumours, and it's not an implausible scenario, but 7% seems high. Biden won't resign in his current state and he's unlikely to go that far downhill in the six months before the convention.
Besides, if they were going to make a serious play for Michelle Obama as candidate they'd be doing some battlespace preparation. Michelle Obama would be doing public appearances, making speeches, getting her face on television. And as far as I can figure out, she's not doing any of that stuff right now.
Yeah, it doesn't strike me as particularly likely, as it doesn't seem like it would fly with Independent voters, who would, I think, see it as 'gimmicky'.
I also don't think she would want to do it. They are, I believe, making a ton of money right now and are very popular (or at least regarded well). She doesn't necessarily seem power hungry, so I would think it would be mostly downside for her.
Yeah, I could see lots of serious thought about Biden alternatives, but she's not high on the list. Newsome is far more obvious, but so are a lot of current senators and governors who are at least in the spotlight somewhere and have personally done politics. I wouldn't say Michelle is at 0%, but not much above that.
The only scenario where Michelle pulls ahead is if we consider the DNC a conspiracy that has the power and willingness to rig the primaries completely behind the scenes such that their preferred candidate (who I assume is a pretend way to get her husband re-elected?) doesn't even have to try to appeal to anyone.
The thinking, I believe, is that if you were to jump somebody over Harris, it would have to be a black woman, or there would be too much blowback.
And, even though Biden is looking not particularly fit, mentally or physically, he is the incumbent, and he did beat Trump last time they contested, so it would require something fairly drastic, I'd think, to try to get him off the ticket.
I don't know about Polymarket, but I heard that PredictIt had massively skewed odds for Trump in 2020, including people betting on him *even after Biden was sworn in as president*. With low betting limits and high fees, it's hard to correct low probabilities like that.
Recently I had a somewhat strange experience. I'm sure it's perfectly normal, but it felt like the kind of thing that would appear at the start of a conspiracy thriller or ghost story if those were things that could actually happen.
When I went out for ice cream, there was a guy sitting on a bench on the sidewalk in front of the Apple Store. He didn't have anything to do other than occasionally check his phone and just sat there for forty minutes looking around for no apparent reason. He often looked at the Apple Store, and I guessed that he must be waiting for someone inside, although 40 minutes seemed like a long time for someone to be inside.
The strangest part is that right after I finished eating my ice cream 40 minutes later, just as I was preparing to leave, he abruptly got up and walked up the street ahead of me. He walked half a block up and disappeared inside a burger shop, so I thought he might be meeting someone there, but when I went inside right afterwards out of curiosity, there was no sign of him or anyone else he might have been meeting. He'd just vanished.
The best explanation I can think of is that he had to use the bathroom and immediately hid in the bathroom so I didn't see him, but that still doesn't explain why he sat outside for 40 minutes with nothing to do or why he went to that specific restaurant to use the bathroom. And it's probably for customers only anyway. The whole thing was very mysterious.
P.S. He also had a mask on the whole time (despite sitting outside), which itself is pretty uncommon nowadays.
(My guess is he worked at the restaurant, was on break, and you and he just happen to time up in your actions. There is also probably another substack with a comment asking why a guy eating ice cream was staring at me for 40 minutes while i was on my lunch break then followed me into where I work.)
I used to work at a movie theater. One day I saw a bunch of Waffle House employees come in, buy some of our overpriced Coke, and leave without seeing a movie. They get free Coke at their own workplace, and it was impossible to get to that movie theater without driving past a Waffle House.
Reminds me of a sight at a bus station long ago; a guy was using the pay phone there, and then he hung up, and pulled out his cell phone to call someone.
Likely illegal activity. I have heard that major telephone companies pulled pay phones not because they were unprofitable, but because they were used significantly (large majority?) for criminal activity.
If he was very focused on the Apple Store, could be he worked for one of the companies that employ people just to count footfall, with hedge funds, competitors or even the store itself paying for the data (although imagine nowadays the store could probably do it much more cheaply with some cameras and software).
I needed to get my ipad repaired recently. They give you a time slot to see a technician. Then, often, they tell you they're running late and here is your new time slot. So, guy sitting outside the Apple Store for 40 minutes seems normal. Also: guy waits for 40 minutes and then needs to visit the restroom sounds normal.
By coincidence I’m reading one of his novels now, ‘VALIS’. It’s actually pretty good. I don’t know it’s your cup of tea but here is a link to it’s Wikipedia page.
Yeah, old sci fi guy. A lot of what the hell is going on here stuff. Your comment seems mildly paranoid. PDK made a good living on stories that were very paranoid.
That reminds me of an experience I had recently. I was sitting in front of the Apple Store minding my own and I saw a guy eating an ice cream. No big deal there, you might think, but he was eating an ice cream for a full forty minutes. Who the heck takes forty minutes to eat an ice cream?
I too was intrigued by the 40-minute ice cream. Doesn't it melt? Was this a single ice cream or was this "I finished one scoop, let me return and purchase another" kind of thing?
I am told that ice cream is the perfect food for coming down of off fentanyl. Never tried it myself, though. And really, ice cream is the perfect food for a number of situations.
‘The Good Thief’ Nick Nolte plays a heroin addict. To temporarily kick the habit he lays in a supply of ice cream and has someone handcuff him to his bed.
I like ice cream a little too much myself so limit myself to a pint for breakfast once a year on my birthday. Only 8 or so months to go.
This is a high foot-traffic downtown area, and also the Apple Store hires a police officer to constantly be on guard right there, so it's pretty much the worst possible place you could pick. (Although oddly, the police officer was eating dinner across the street at the time, something I've never seen before.)
If there's one thing Breaking Bad taught me, it's that you want to do your meet somewhere in a public place. Way less chance someone sticks a gun in your face and takes your money or your dope.
A proper solution would be a permanent redirect from "astralcodexten.com" to "www.astralcodexten.com"; not sure whether Substack or Scott needs to implement it.
Periodically I see people link to Sam Kriss in these open threads, and I wanted to drop a link to his most recent post, which is one of the best things I've read in months
not sure it works, romantic love is obsessive yes, but the terrorism doesn't work as an extreme metaphor. The lovers always face each other, and the demands are often more about the desire than the result. you also need a self first to love and be loved-you don't gain one by loving.
if the point is polyamory is a shallow connection and monogamy is deeper, it could be said better. i still dont agree, the danger is you still get deep connection but with only one of the polycule. You get power differential and one person in sadness. its more you can't just banish jealousy or the connective aspects of sex.
I actually took it as fairly nihilistic - he points to a love so all consuming, morality and human decency is thrown away. But it's a near-certainty he himself hasn't and isn't experiencing such a love, because he's not dead or in jail. Indeed, it's a certainty even if somehow a small slice of humanity had a culture like the one depicted where "acts of terrorism and mass murder is how you demonstrate your love," it would diminish much more quickly than any religion from the *inside,* much less the outside.
Sure, he makes the obligatory handwave to poly being "shallow lukewarm puddles" vs the real incandescent and consuming fires of *ACTUAL* love, but the "actual" love he's pointing to is an unattainable, unsustainable shibboleth that nobody in their right mind ever experiences, thus handwaving away both poly and the real-world love that monogamous people feel.
I mean, I guess I could be wrong - um - for the other people here, is this what real-world love feels like to *you?* You would commit acts of mass murder and terrorism for it?
Otherwise, straight nihilism and a dismissal of basically ALL real world love, whether poly or monogamous.
I also, perhaps because I'm very interested in Charles Taylor's notion of the buffered self, I think the part about love as "feeling out the outer edges that define your self in the form of the other" is really central to understanding what the essay is getting at. Much more central than the all-consuming terrorist love that sets it up.
So if you're not familiar with Sam's writing, I don't think people read him or like him with any expectation that he's saying factually true or reasonable things. It's rather that he has a gift for saying ridiculous, extravagant things that draw one in to a sharp point of insight.
The terrorism is a frame story. "But tell us—what are you more afraid of? The possibility that the realisation of your freedom and the purpose of your existence lies outside the bounds of yourself? Or—a bomb?" The Armed Front is using acts of violence to draw people's attention to the ways that therapeutic safetyist mindsets are reinforcing the buffered self against the possibility of real, satisfying love. The inclusion of the Armed Front in the essay is doing the same thing. The 'unattainable, unsustainable shibboleth' and the manifesto framing are there to heighten contrast, not to tell you that that's what love is or is supposed to be. I don't think the essay is saying that real love between persons should express itself in unlimited atrocity. It's saying that real, committed, vulnerable love between persons should be -more like- the nihilism of the chivalric terrorists than the nihilism of self-help affirmations. i.e. "The Somme-heavy barrage of helpful, healthful messaging, here to inform you that you should not seek your self-realisation in and through other people, because other people will always disappoint you. For your own wellbeing, you should avoid allowing anyone to happen to you."
Thanks - if that's the thrust of it you were getting out of it, I don't think he's doing it well for people like me who don't regularly read him.
Everything's a gradient. He's posited two endcaps on the gradient, both of them clearly bad. All this florid verbiage and wide-eyed detail is to merely argue that you should be a few ticks closer to the *right* end, not the *left* end?
BORING. Also, not very well communicated.
And like any gradient, the span of humanity is going to be distributed across the gradient, regardless of what he writes or recommends. Arguing in a Straussian way for being a few ticks closer to his end doesn't seem very insightful or likely to drive anyone to change their actions in the ways he wants.
But then, I'm clearly not the target audience here.
So... there's a criticism of expectations of socially-constructed demonstrations of love? If everyone else were committing acts of terrorism as an expression of love, wouldn't you go along, because otherwise what would your beloved say?
So, not satisfied with Microsoft's paltry billions, Sam Altman seems to be asking the UAE for seven *trillion* dollars to build lots of new high-end chip fabs. This strikes me as roughly equivalent to 1960s Dr. Evil asking for "one hundred billion dollars!", and everybody laughs because there's not that much money in the world. OK, I missed the bit where they redefined M1 a few years ago and there's now a bit over twenty trillion dollars in (mostly virtual) circulation; he's only asking for one-third of all the dollars in the world.
And yes, I get that he's not literally asking for a supertanker full of dollars; he's looking for capital broadly defined and in many forms. It still doesn't pass the giggle test; I talked about this with people I know in the AI and chip-manufacturing fields, and there are too many parts of this plan that aren't going to work. First off, the combined sovereign wealth funds of all the petrostates don't quite reach the seven-terabuck level, and they're not all going to give everything to Sam Altman no matter what he promises. Second, the semiconductor industry can't usefully absorb that level of investment in much less than a generation. We don't have the people, or the tooling, or the resources, and we don't have the people to train the people or the tools to build the tools on less than a generational timescale. And even if you handwave seven trillion dollars' worth of chip fabs into existence, we don't have the electric power generation capacity to run all those chips (and the associated cooling stacks).
So, what is Sam up to? The simplest, easiest answer is that he's just trolling us, generating bullshit or hype for whatever purpose. That seems unsatisfactory as an explanation, but it's possible.
If he imagines that he's actually going to get the seven trillion dollars, I'm pretty sure he's wrong. If he thinks that, given the seven trillion dollars, the stuff he wants to buy with it will be available in the marketplace, I'm pretty sure he's wrong. And if the plan is that he's going to manage the construction of a vertically-integrated industrial economy on the scale of Israel or Sweden so as to build all the stuff he wants to buy, then yeah, he's wrong and mocking laughter is warranted.
Is there something else he might be up to that's not laughably wrong? Or at least wrong in some interesting way I haven't thought of?
Also, this suggests that Sam Altman seems to believe that, in order to achieve his goal, he thinks he needs seven trillion dollars' worth of computronium. Well, of computronium-manufacturing capability, so probably tens of trillions of dollars worth of computronium. And lots of new power plants.
If Sam Altman's goal is "build a true AGI", or maybe ASI, does that mean he thinks true AGI/ASI requires more computronium than sensible people think is going to exist in the next twenty years?
$ 7 trillion all at once is of course laughable. But if the idea is a continuous ramp-up of investments, over the course of a few decades, then it's not necessarily so crazy. The US interstate system seems to have cost $0.5 trillion (in somewhat recent dollars). This would be an investment 14 times as big. There are those who would claim it's 14 times as important.
If that's the case, the crazy part is bringing up now money you don't expect to need for twenty years. The people who might invest in twenty years aren't in the audience, and you're weakening the near-term pitch for the people who are.
It's possible that Altman would have made that mistake, but unlikely that the WSJ wouldn't have commented on it.
It is rather putting the cart before the horse. What do you need a fab for, if you don't have a design. If you have a design, you can find custom fabs.
As you alluded to, one doesn't merely buy a fab and do great things. You start out with a purpose. Along the way, you develop some objectives. You're working with system architects, circuitry architects, then transistor architects. Then you discover some of the objectives can't be met with the custom fabs available. So you get to work with the photo-lithography vendors to see what tools, materials, designs they may be working on, which together you can tailor to fit your needs. Then you are into fab materials, fab processes, and you're working at the cutting edge, hiring employees away from the photo-lithography vendors, having your employees hired away by the photo-lithography vendors, and back and forth with the competition, and you're making test runs and you've got a validation center, and design automation teams, and mask designers, and probably about ten thousand people in your organization .... and then we'll talk about conducive geographies, and somewhere way down the line, ten billion dollars to build a state of the art fab.
Oh my, this is like 99% of journalism, and that's before GPT started writing it all.
Actually, GPT may improve the state of journalism, because it will be able to write stories based on facts (and only occasionally hallucinate something), as opposed to needing to invent things all the time. But that will all depend on who writes the prompts.
This is an extraordinarily optimistic view of the usage of large language models and AI in general. This is akin to saying, "with the advent of the internet and true facts being at our fingertips, journalists will really only report the truth because the truth will be so readily available, without requiring all the hard reading and travel that classic investigation required." Yeah, it doesn't work like that, and neither will our new big tool.
I'm sorry if I missed you being sarcastic or facetious. Well done if so.
> Oh my, this is like 99% of journalism, and that's before GPT started writing it all.
Hot take: this is AIs first clumsy attempt at manipulating humans into giving it the ressources it needs to achieve super-intelligence and, subsequently, world domination.
>Is there something else he might be up to that's not laughably wrong? Or at least wrong in some interesting way I haven't thought of?
Well, the last thread was talking about Elon Musk's payment deal getting scuttled due to lack of negotiating from the other party, so from the armchair it looks like Sam's ensuring people will come back with smaller numbers at it will look more like a back-and-forth. It's "Queen's Duck" chicanery for bureaucratic checkmarking.
What number could he be pursuing for which $7 trillion is too much but not out of the ballpark? $1 trillion? That's still way too high for anything useful that one guy or organization could ever use. That's enough to buy the entire semiconductor sector already. If you're going to do that, then go sign a deal with someone major in that sector and coordinate to get the money together. It's cheaper and comes with institutional backing.
That only works if the initial numbers are modestly too high, not ludicrously too high, As noted below, if you ask for a million-dollar starting salary in your first job out of college, this does not ensure that people "come back with smaller numbers", rather it ensures that they stop taking your phone calls.
The whole paragraph is: "The OpenAI chief executive officer is in talks with investors including the United Arab Emirates government to raise funds for a wildly ambitious tech initiative that would boost the world’s chip-building capacity, expand its ability to power AI, among other things, and cost several trillion dollars, according to people familiar with the matter. The project could require raising as much as $5 trillion to $7 trillion, one of the people said"
So the big headline number comes down to an unnamed source talking about an unspecified project. It sounds like a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Ultimately I don't think there's a lot of point in over-interpreting it.
There's definitely sometimes advantages to anchoring big numbers in people's minds, though. Especially if you're talking to middle eastern sovereign wealth funds, whose main problem is that they have too much money to invest sensibly.
>So the big headline number comes down to an unnamed source talking about an unspecified project. It sounds like a back-of-the-envelope calculation.
Yeah, this sounds like it could have gone through several levels of misinterpretation too.
One wild thought: Normally I think of massive computation for LLMs as the training costs. What if Altman expects to have full AGI in a few years, and this is a calculation for the _inference_ computation costs to replace some large fraction of the total global workforce?
But they *don't* have that much money to invest, sensibly or otherwise. That's the point, or part of it. I think most of the money they do have is sensibly invested in diverse portfolios, but it doesn't matter whether it's sensible or not, the seven trillion dollars for chip fabs just isn't realistically available.
And there's no advantage to anchoring ridiculously bid numbers in people's minds. Seriously, the whole "ask for the stars and they'll give you the Moon!" thing really does not work. What Altman seems to be doing, is akin to asking for an entry-level white-collar job with a starting salary of one million dollars per year. This does not "anchor" you in the hiring manager's mind as a superstar that he should be trying to scrape together $500K/year for, it just makes him roundfile your resume and go on to the next one.
I can pretty much guarantee that there are many reasonable proposals for the couple hundred billion dollars the UAE will want to invest over the coming year. And plenty more unreasonable ones to be quickly roundfiled. Probably including Altman's.
No, they don't have seven trillion, but they do have a lot of money. And if you start talking about a business opportunity that can easily absorb trillions (but which can definitely totally do great things for ten billion) then they might be interested.
And you're right, "anchoring" doesn't always work, which is why I said it sometimes works. You need to apply it very judiciously, but it's a legit strategy. Since Sam Altman appears to be a better businessman than I am, I won't nitpick his use of it.
I also don't think anything in the article suggests that it is $7 trillion in one year - its almost not certainly. A project that would be $7 trillion over 40 years is, yeah gigantic but doable. If the number was said at all - which is dubious - it was a parameter across time as well as projects.
Yes, my guess would be that Altman said something along the lines of, "We'll eventually want a total of $7T investment over the next X years, right now we're looking for $Y in our series A round, do you want in?"
That's still an incredibly poor pitch. If you tell your prospective investors that you think you'll need $7E12 to succeed, then your prospective investors will assume that since there isn't $7E12 for you to have nor any reasonable place to put it, you're going to fail. In which case, their lesser up-front investment will just be getting them in on the ground floor of a failure.
Or, if "X years" is long enough for the economy to grow to the point where $7E12 investments are a thing, then you're saying that you are working to much longer time horizons than they are, and what's their exit strategy if they need to cash out in five years?
This probably the wrong place to ask but has pro football become less brutal in the last 20 or 30 years? I watched the end of the Super Bowl last night - to see if the Taylor Swift psyop succeeded. ;-) - and it looked a lot less bone crunching than I remember.
Yeah, I think the long term effects of suffering repeated hits to the head are better understood today than they were 30 years ago. There's also the fact that as salaries for players have gone up and up and up, the cost of losing players for extended periods of time to injury has also gone up, which has led to rule changes to try to make the game safer.
Yeah, all pro sports are trying to limit player injuries. The NFL has all sorts of rules about how you are allowed to hit/ block/ tackle another player. Fighting is way down in hockey and less 'nasty' hits. (not that all the violence doesn't still happen.)
On the one hand the rules have shifted to penalize some types of hits that were legal, and/or shrugged off by the officials, during lets say the 1970s-1990s. So you don't see those nearly as often.
Meanwhile though the players are somewhat bigger and are much faster at a lot of positions. I.e. the foot speed that a Lawrence Taylor had as a linebacker which was exceptional in the 1980s is now just normal for that position in the NFL. And since basic physics hasn't changed -- kinetic energy still equals mass times velocity squared -- the amount of force being delivered in routine hits today is significantly greater than back in the day.
A similar dynamic has played out in my household's fave pro sport, ice hockey. A lot of the routine hacking/slashing/fistfights has been legislated out. But meanwhile the median NHL skater is both somewhat larger and _much_ faster than 30 years ago, and they've all come up through levels of youth hockey in which "finish your checks" is as basic in the coaching as "head on a swivel" or whatever. So if you go back and watch some 1980s/90s NHL hockey on YouTube it will seem downright gentle in terms of physicality compared to today -- until somebody shoves somebody from behind into the boards and the line brawl breaks out. (And then most fans only remember the line brawls.)
This is the best answer. The players are much better so the offenses and defenses have moved away from smashing into each other all the time. And the NHL has opened things up so much that players can actually skate and score goals instead of just dumping it in all the time.
Personally, I think both sports are much better for these changes. The NBA I think has gone too far and reduced physical defense too much, but I am not really a fan so its not my business really.
Oh dear, Re NHL, long time Sabres fan (we won't talk about the current team, sigh.) But there was much more fighting back in the 80-90's. Isn't that the Rob Ray (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Ray) time in Buffalo? As a Sabres fan I love Rob, but I'm also glad his 'position' is mostly gone from the current line up.
Big difference between physicality in checking and fighting. The best offensive player of this generation (Ovi) is quite possibly the best checking forward as well. That was definitely not the case in the past.
I grew up in the town that houses the US hockey hall of fame. I was a terrible disappointment to my hockey loving friends and relatives. One year of PeeWee and my coach told my parents that I was too tall and skinny and was probably going to get hurt. :(
Why do I perceive people talking about sports to sound dumb? Is it because I’ve chosen to think sports knowledge is a waste of synapses, or is there something to it? I find sports talk particularly vacuous because it seems like dumb talk that tries to sound smart, full of technical speak and numbers.
Possibly because you've absorbed cultural signals that say that jocks are dumb and nerds are smart? Your point about "smart talk with lots of numbers and stats that's actually vacuous" could apply equally well to a lot of other hobbies (e.g. Warhammer 40K, video games, certain types of people who are really into politics).
My brother went through the NFL questions on Manifold with my father and bet on those whose probability had a large difference compared to the probability my father claimed. He got a 30% gain in total. Sports fans might be dumb, but apparently they are smarter than the state of the art technology for predicting the futute.
Because everyone can enjoy it, which means the average person enjoying sports is roughly as smart as the average American...which is pretty dumb. More horrific still, if you go to a bar to enjoy a game with average Americans, you will notice to your horror that half the people are dumber than the average American, some are even almost as dumb as the French.
Whereas connoisseurs of the finer things in life, like us, can understand the intricacies of D&D and engage in hours of joyous, stimulating debate over the advantages of 5th edition vs 3.5 edition (3rd is simply worse) while hopping we don't awaken the true gentlemen of class who actually understand Thac0.
Straight up, the best thing about football is that it gives me something to talk about with 90% of men in awkward social situations where social custom demands I make mouth sounds with someone I share no interests in common with. This is unironically amazing and super valuable. There are tons of really solid guys I like and respect but...I'm a giant nerd and they're not and it's nice to have something to talk with them about. But it does mean that sports is basically the only time I interact with dumb people, despite the fact that there are some super smart sports guys.
It's mostly a joke. I think the big issue, from memory, isn't complexity but an almost obnoxious counter-intuitiveness. Like Armor Class. Everywhere else in life, big number is gooder, smaller number is badder. It's not complex to invert that, it's just annoying.
Hey pal, Steph Curry’s 3 point shots are a thing of rare beauty. - yeah the implied irritation is feigned for comic effect but those shots really are somethin’
But more seriously the counting and summing neurons approach to Utilitarian ends - to non true believers at least - seems pretty vacuous too.
You’re just not that interested in sports and that’s just fine.
I don't know what sort of sports talk you have been listening to, but one possibility is that the participants are (consciously or unconsciously) aiming at goals that are different from the goals you typically aim at in conversation. For example, it may be more important for the participants to express (and thus share) their enthusiasm for the sport in general, for a particular team, player, or game, than to state true facts and make "good" arguments (evaluated according to the standards of truth-seeking dialogue).
This is a very good point. When two people are talking about the Super Bowl, if you squint, it kind of sounds like a thoughtful argument with a lot of evidence, but upon further inspection it doesn’t hold.
Do you have a specific example of what sounds dumb?
I don't follow sports at all, but when I do hear guys like Bill Simmons and Klosterman talk nba or football, they sound more like geeks than idiots. Maybe it's just the case that the appeal is so wide, idiots like it too.
I think Quiop got it. It’s a type of conversation that has the qualities of a sophisticated argument (e.g.: data), but which is in fact entertainment. It’s the contrast that does it for me.
It seems attorneys are still valuable given Scott is happy to pay the normal rate, but for other services he often requests the service provider give freely. Or maybe I am misremembering.
My mistake, it was meant as a comment on the relative value of the legal profession vs others, not as a callout. To your question, I thought I'd seen a few volunteer requests in previous open threads, but it seems I was misremembering. Thanks for the thought provocation.
No you're not misremembering. Scott does ask for help on a volunteer basis occasionally. Most recently in open thread 310:
"I‘m looking for an EEG expert, a TCMS expert, and a very-finicky-high-level statistics expert to (on a volunteer basis) review certain ACX Grants proposals."
Just to be clear, I don't think there's anything at all wrong with him doing that.
Agreed that there’s nothing wrong it. I suspect the difference is that there he’s looking for volunteers for a charitable project, which he happens to be organizing. Here, he probably feels more like he’s asking on his own behalf. If it’s for a similar project that pours cold water on my theory, but there’s also a difference in norms around what people expect to volunteer for vs what they expect to get paid for (and our intuitions on that are fuzzy).
Additionally the "tax benefits of charitable giving" are a real quantity of money directly in his pocket. Of course I am happy to pay someone 200 dollars to save me 20,000 dollars - while asking for a volunteer for some nebulously profitable project makes a lot of sense.
Does anyone have suggestions for resources to learn just enough C++ to port a sketch/simple library from the old Arduino uno AVR architecture to work on either an ESP8266 based board or an arduino R4 board (yes I realize that these are two different chips with two different architectures, I don't need both, just either/or)?
My current programming experience is all in either R or python, and my small amount of googling hasn't turned up anything that seems really accessible to learning C++, especially as relevant to these micro-controllers.
I think someone is impersonating Freddie de Boer on Twitter and am not sure what to do about it.
Like the good tweets. If he's accurate at all, there will be a couple here and there, mixed in between tunnel-vision naivete.
Call for policy input on reduction in Wealth tax in Norway
I wrote an email to the mayor of my hometown, commending their proposal to remove the municipal element of the Norwegian wealth tax. If they go through with this, Bodø will be the first maior municipality in Norway to remove it: https://www.nrk.no/nordland/lokker-skatteflyktninger-hjem-til-bodo-med-kutt-i-formueskatt-1.16755507 (Article in Norwegian)
I wrote :
"
Thank you for looking at powerful measures to make Bodø an even more attractive place to make your home, both privately and as a business.
My girlfriend and I are moving from Oslo to Bodø this May, to live close to family - not as a result of a superior job market: But imagine how cool it would be if the best technology jobs were up north!?
When you now look at the reduction in wealth tax, I hope you also have an eye on the problems surrounding startups, which have been thoroughly covered over time by the newspaper Shifter:
https://www.shifter.no/nyheter/jeg-matte-velge-skal-jeg-holde-til-i-norge-eller-vil-jeg-at-selskapet-mitt-skal-lykkes/266945 (Article in Norwegian)
In short, the issue is this: Startup founders can sit with large fortunes on paper, long before they get significant turnover, and years before profits. This means that the most ambitious would do well to leave the country even before they get investors. What if they just had to move a few degrees of longitude north?
My wish is that you can see Bodø's position and opportunities in context when you complete this inquiry, so that this will also be a stimulator for existing and future technology initiatives.
Technology workers are mobile, nature loving people, in search of strong communities. Here, Bodø makes a strong case, and stronger with each passing year, with direct flights to the east via Helsinki, a new UiT location, and an already strong technology sector. If a would-be founder can also calculate that over time he will be left with a larger share of his own company, Bodø is the obvious choice.
"
Following this, I have been invited to meet with the mayor(!) The problem is that I am neither a founder or an economist.
If you want to help me present a strong case either towards the main policy of a reduction or removal of the municipal wealth tax, or towards other actions that could synergize to help make Bodø the tech/ startup capital of Norway, please write below!
How much daylight are you getting in Bodø mid February?
About 8 hours! It's only really january that is a drag to get through, in my opinion.
Ah, Scandinavia, heartland of ancient genocide.
https://phys.org/news/2024-02-scandinavia-farmers-slaughtered-hunter-population.html
There was almost complete population replacement in Denmark 5900 years ago. And then it happened again 4850 years ago.
So apparently this launched yesterday...
https://openai.com/sora
...Man, we're so fucked.
If for some reason you haven't already, I highly suggest that you remove any pictures of yourself from the internet. Things are going to get real ugly.
Sometimes it's good to have the most average, mediocre bearded white guy face.
Two examples, from Twitter, of nominative determinism of a particular kind, not sure how to call it:
The "German chocolate cake" is a kind of chocolate cake named after 19th century American baker Samuel German.
The "Outerbridge Crossing" is the outermost bridge in NYC, named after Port Authority chairman Eugenius Harvery Outerbridge.
The Cincinnati area has Northgate, Eastgate, and Southgate, all three of which are in the locations you'd expect from the names, but Southgate is apparently named after the Southgate family, not because it's to the south of the city.
https://www.wvxu.org/podcast/oki-wanna-know/2021-11-10/oki-wanna-know-cincinnati-doesnt-have-neighborhood-named-westgate
Main Street in San Francisco is a fairly small road named after businessman Charles Main.
You could call them both "surprise eponyms", and Outerbridge Crossing a subtype of that, a "serendipitous eponym".
For anyone curious, German is an English surname: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_(surname)
This inspired me to ask Gemini (Google's LLM) whether Alexander Graham Bell invented the bell-like ringing of telephones. He didn't.
The cake has nothing German in it. It's like Vienna sausages which are called "Frankfurter" in Vienna. Or the jelly doughnuts "Berliner" which are called "Pfannkuchen" in Berlin https://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/runde-4/f03/ which is weird because that means "pancake", whereas pancakes are called "Eierkuchen" (egg cake) in Berlin. Uh, I seem to have digressed a bit...
Ich bin ein…
I know. That's why I called Outerbridge Crossing a "serendipitous eponym": by chance, the name that inspired the eponym is appropriate for the thing being named.
By contrast, German chocolate cake is merely a "surprise eponym", because people will be surprised when they learn the name is an eponym, rather than a name along the lines of Swiss cheese or English muffins.
Funny how eponyms are often not used in the place they're named after. English muffins are called just "muffins" in England. They can be used for French toast, which is called "pain perdu" (lost bread) in France. And I bet Americans aren't aware of the sugar-coated sweet cake "Amerikaner": https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerikaner_(Geb%C3%A4ck)
Americans do eat "American cheese", while calling it such. And to preempt the obvious, it melts more cleanly that most cheddar, which is important in some contexts.
What do they call that thin slice of meat in a an Egg McMuffin in Toronto?
Wait, I thought English muffins were "crumpets" in England.
I've seen those in America, but I couldn't think of their name. The English version of that article just calls them "black and white cookies".
OC ACXLW Sat Feb 17 Political Trauma and Excuse Game Theory
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 56th Orange County ACX/LW meetup, happening this Saturday and most Saturdays after that.
Host: Michael Michalchik
Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (For questions or requests)
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place
(949) 375-2045
Date: Saturday, Feb 17 2024
Time 2 pm
Conversation Starters :
Is political discourse degenerating into trauma responses? How is the madness of crowds amplifying trauma politics?
The Psychopolitics Of Trauma - by Scott Alexander
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopolitics-of-trauma
Audio
https://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/the-psychopolitics-of-trauma
The Game theory of excuses:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gFMH3Cqw4XxwL69iy/eight-short-studies-on-excuses
Audio: https://podcastaddict.com/the-nonlinear-library-lesswrong-top-posts/episode/138515464
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/A2Qam9Bd9xpbb2wLQ/game-theory-as-a-dark-art
Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are readily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
Putin just endorsed Biden. "Stable" and "predictable".
I hadn't realized that he was this much of a **troll**. I can't quite picture Putin giggling; maybe he smirks, or just stares with a blank deadpan expression.
“It’s the kiss of death from Mr. Goldfinger”
He just trolled Tucker Carlson for not asking tough question during their interview. Unbelievable.
https://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-tucker-carlson-soft-interview/
Huh, I'd seen the interview billed as "let's actually ask Putin why he invaded Ukraine", so I wasn't expecting hardball questions. I do like this Putin quote:
> "He tried to interrupt me several times, but still, surprisingly for a Western journalist, he turned out to be patient and listened to my lengthy dialogues, especially those related to history, and didn’t give me reason to do what I was ready for. So frankly, I didn’t get complete satisfaction from this interview."
I came here to say that I'm thinking of voting for Robert Kennedy. (I guess I first have to work to get him on the ballot.) His take on Biden is blistering, and he would destroy him in a debate... like that matters.
Heck, he might even make it (which, of course, would make it a *classic* troll - saying something you actually mean, but in a way guaranteed to get a rise). As much as fervent pro-Russia types have been claiming that Biden has a secret plan to take US directly to WW3 Any. Day. Now, under Biden - a traditional cold war prez - the rules of the game are clear; US is participating in a proxy war, but it stays a proxy war. Money flows in, weapons (under certain, though shifting limits) flow in, intel flows in, probably a limited amount of hush-hush special ops persons have flown in - but US troops, as a large-scale deployment, stay out.
Trump does mean uncertainty. Maybe he'd pull everything out? Maybe he'd go all in? Maybe he'd start a war in some completely unexpected location or do a Nixon in China, with China? Who knows?
Oh come on. Nixon in China took a fair degree of competence and the humility and self awareness to recognize the competence of others.
Trump might earn himself a ‘beautiful letter’ at best.
Hey, that's just what would make it even *more* unexpected. It was, after all, extremely unexpected already that Nixon, with a reputation for strong anti-communism, would court China. No-one would have expected Trump to court Kim Jong Un, of all people.
True. Nixon’s well known anti communism reputation was key for domestic acceptance of detente with China. Kissinger briefed Nixon for over 40 hours prepping for the initial meetings with Zhou and Mao Zedong. It was bold but carefully prepared and carefully executed diplomacy
I’m not sayings Trump wouldn’t stage an impulsive and self aggrandizing photo op. I just don’t think anything meaningful would come of it.
Yeah, a big part of the problem with the North Korea "summits" was that there was basically zero prep work on the American side. Trump walked in with a proposal that Kim absolutely wasn't going to accept, and didn't have a fallback position when Kim didn't go for it.
I would expect more of the same from any Trump summits in a hypothetical second term.
I think it is good that multiple ways exist to pay for online content. Some videos have ads, some authors have Patreon accounts, some people use their free content as an advertisement for their paid content.
But some people just do everything at the same time -- for example a YouTube video that contains ads from YouTube *and* in the middle of the video there is an ad for a third party *and* at the end of the video there is an ad for author's paid videos on a different website *and* there is a link to author's Patreon account.
Are these people completely shameless? Or is everyone else stupid for leaving a lot of money on the table? Speaking for myself, I wouldn't send a cent to a person who seems so greedy. But I am not a typical internet user; other people might enjoy being abused.
These people are shameless whores, but every one of us is either willing to be a sellout or so close as to make little difference, that it's hypocritical for 99% of us to judge too harshly.
I think a lot of it comes down to knowing your audience. Some people can get away with multiple forms of income from the same video - maybe their viewers love them or maybe they don't have any steady viewers and so milk whoever they can get.
Unfortunately, as streaming services and places like YouTube add more and more advertisements and other monetization, it gets easier and easier for people to add their own and not get pushback on it. It becomes expected like broadcast TV in the 90s. Who knows, maybe we'll get accustomed to taking bathroom breaks during commercials like we did in those days.
On Youtube, you can skip in-video ads by just pressing the "skip 10 seconds key" repeatedly or clicking on the timeline. It's a lot less obnoxious than the linear TV era.
At least in some cases, creators have started doing promotions because they can't rely on ad income anymore due to arbitrary demonetization.
Having shame is stupid, so both are true. Never deny customers an opportunity to give you money. Because someone is always going to stupid enough to pay for it.
Shame is the reason we even developed morality at all.
I'm a soon to be 4th year med student and will soon have more time on my hands as rotations calm down. I also have a couple bachelor's degrees (though not super useful ones), decent scientific writing ability, rudimentary stats skills, and significant research experience. However, I can't code unless you count basic R.
Does anyone have thoughts on ways I could earn some money in the next year? I will still have obligations during the week days but a lot of free time in evenings and weekends. The two options I see floated a lot are tutoring and gig economy work. However, I'm too far removed from my prior MCAT tutoring to go back to that, and even if my soon to be released Step 2 score is excellent, there doesn't seem to be much demand for step tutoring. As far as Doordash, I do have a car but it doesn't pay well as far as I can tell. ChatGPT wasn't much help.
Wouldn't count tutoring out until you try and find some work. Especially if you've done it before. Maybe through an agency would be easiest. Could even do SAT tutoring if your scores were good. I say that because, for what it is, it can be extremely high paying. If you can get any work it'll pay a lot better than gig economy would.
tough spot to be in. I was just there a few years ago. I have no direct input as far as gigs to take up. But i will say if you're going to residency, you could also just not optimize too much on money and make quality memories/rest. As a resident myself now (I like residency btw), beyond basic comforts money has little use when you work an average of 70 hours a week.
Unfortunately I kinda need the money in the next year before residency. thanks for the reply and love the Leorio pic!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, appreciate it! I will try that--I need the money
Listening to NPR, and I learned that somebody with "antisemitic texts" in their house shot up a church. Must be a white supremacist nazi or something?
Well I just guess we're going to have to wait and see whether this becomes (a) the only story that the media covers for the next three months or (b) buried on page 12 under "local crime".
Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting on a shooting at a Super Bowl parade in Kansas City. This, too, will either be the big news story of the month or forgotten within an hour depending on the colour of the perp's skin.
(5 hours later and no picture of the suspects, you do the maths.)
And I wonder why the police haven't listed anyone as a person of interest...
What was really interesting was this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSgo3bW3r14 of Biden pausing for 20 seconds and quietly consulting Jill before answering a reporter's question "Do you have any reaction to the shooting in Kansas City?" before refusing to answer.
The police have arrested two suspects, both of whom are juveniles so we won't be getting names or photos for a while. This seems to have been a case of "gangbanger with a gun sees rival gangbanger in a crowded public place, ballistic mayhem ensues", so it's not going to fit the usual mass-shooter narratives.
She had a Palestine sticker on the AK47. Criminal record and a history of mental health issues.
Can anyone recommend good Supreme Court Journalists or bloggers? Preferably ones that focus on the legal argument and do not just talk about about the practical effects the decisions will have on people. Preferably minimal political bias.
Law dork, here on substack
Scotusblog Amy Howe.
The podcast “More Perfect” is great. Often historical, but with good modern tie ins.
...besides the Supreme Court? They've got tapes and transcripts of the arguments.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcript/2023
That's what I used to do, but ever since I had a kid, I no longer have the time to listen to oral arguments and read briefs
I am also interested in other answers, but this is the best that I've managed to find:
(1) scotusblog: pretty much "just the facts"
(2) popehat report: Ken White, former federal prosecutor's blog about the law and big cases in the news. I don't read it regularly, but he was historically very balanced in his blog writing (tweets not so much). Not specifically SCOTUS focused.
(3) Advisory Opinions: David French and Sarah Isgur. Note: they are biased from the right, but they claim a mantle of objectivity. I do think they are making a sincere effort, so partly this shows how difficult it is to be objective. Aside from their political spectrum bias, they are strongly pro-SCOTUS as an institution.
(4) Strict Scrutiny: Melissa Murray, Kate Shaw, Leah Litman. Openly biased from the left, but, like AO, they explain their reasoning. They are moderately anti-SCOTUS as an institution, primarily driven by their opposition to the court's current members.
(5) 5-4 Podcast: Rhiannon Hamam, Peter Shamshiri, Michael Liroff. Strongly anti-SCOTUS as an institution (and not just the current justices).
Ken White now does a podcast with Josh Barry called Serious Trouble. The balance is somewhere in-between his writing and tweeting.
Thank you! I used to read a lot of David French, but really SCOTUSblog is exactly what I was looking for
Do any of the new image generators / alterers allow you to upload pictures of yourself or another person at different ages, and have it adjust different-age pictures to a requested age?
Like you have a picture of your grandma at age 20 and age 90, can it impute a picture of her at age 50?
Or a picture of yourself ten years ago vs today - can you age the younger picture to you today, keeping the background and setting?
Here's a geometry problem that may be a bit challenging, but fun to think about and doodle. I know of two solutions, one of which is strikingly simple.
Consider a convex quadrilateral. Label its sides a,b,c,d in clockwise order, and let its area be S. Prove that S <= (ac+bd)/2.
Well, I think that the cross product of two vectors (which is ||v1||*||v2||*|sin(v1,v2)| gives the area inside the parallelogram defined by these two vectors. Dividing it by 2, we get the area of the triangle defined by v1 and v2. As |sin(v1,v2)| <= 1, we get your inequality. I guess its the strikingly simple proof, but nice problem indeed, it distracted me a bit from my job!
Good job, but that solves an easier inequality: S <= (ab+cd)/2.
Oh! Indeed.
Well, let's take the S <= (ab+cd)/2 for granted and apply it to the a,c,b,d quadrangle. We can now write S2 <= (ac+bd)/2. Now, if I read Bretschneider's formula right (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretschneider%27s_formula), it seems like a quadrangle's area is totally determined by its sides (which are fixed in our case), and the sum of two opposed angles (which can usually be tuned to the optimal 180°, except for edge cases). So it looks like the maximal area of quadrangle is unchanged by the order you put the segments in.
So S2max = Smax <= (ac+bd)/2. And as S <= Smax, we get to the desired result.
The edge case aforementioned only seems to concern quadrangles with a null area. And the inequality stands in that case too.
I am not very satisfied with my answer as I am using a formula that carries a lot more information than what is needed to prove your inequality.
Edit:
In fact, no need for this fancy formula. Let's take an "optimal quadrangle", ie one which area is maximal, given its sides. We can break it in two "optimal" triangles. If we permute two sides, we can still reform this optimal triangle, only mirrored: the area is unaffected. That's how we can prove that the maximal area of a quadrangle only depends on the length of its sides, not their order.
Very funny problem, thanks for sharing it!
EA for Jews is running another round of the EA and Judaism Intro Fellowship this March (https://eaforjews.org/take-action/fellowship/)!
The fellowship has been impactful for many participants, and I expect there are many others who would enjoy and benefit from the program if they heard about it!
If you are connected to any Jewish communities or networks, please help spread the word! Here are some resources for doing so: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wD7LWMFbwBGTmZkN-oAFZyQ0vbRHUjHE5pnf56-vVU4/edit#heading=h.ijx47wt9n700
"EA for Jews"
Jews complain about "othering", but then put their jewishness front and center in everything for no apparent reason
Jews complain about othering? That's news to me. As far as I know most of them are accustomed to separate but equal
Throat clear, love Jews, throat clear.
Well, there *is* also EA for Christians.
Maybe, but I'll bet "EA for Christians" is almost entirely composed of actual Christians, whereas "EA for Jews" is almost entirely composed of atheists.
I mean, they *might* be different Jews. Y'know, just maybe. Like every other stereotypable group.
Is there any way to disable the substack subscribe pop-up? I've noticed this site does not have the pop up either for the main page or the individual articles. However I cannot find instructions on how to turn it off anywhere on the internet? (edit I have figured out how to turn it off the individual articles, but is there any way to remove it from the main page without linking to the archive)
This drives me crazy too. Every single time I want to read a non-ACX Substack post, I first have to scroll down until the screen goes dark and the popup appears, click X on the popup, and then scroll back up and actually read the damn article. It's insane.
I believe Pycea's ACX plugin allows it to be removed on this site?
Use uBlock origin (which you should be using anyway) and use the select and block feature. Removes anything on a webpage that you don't want to see. This is the only place I'd advertise this extension because it's so good that if it gets too popular, our lizard overlords will ensure it gets shut down.
...Why are you acting like adblockers are some obscure thing?
Because I live and work in the world, around other people. I talk to them about tech stuff, and ad blockers come up. Do you do that? I don't work in the tech industry.
Is there a way to check your post history? I was banned from a particular Substack and I have no real idea why. I only discovered it recently, presumably quite a ways after the fact, since I don't post on their Substack much. I am curious if, in fact, the individual in question didn't even ban me for posts on their own Substack, but it was one of those bans you see on Reddit sometimes where it's because they said something you don't like elsewhere.
If you click your profile and then Activity, it will show a list of replies to your comments by date, that's the closest I've found to listing them.
Add mine to the litany of complaints about substack lacking the most fucking basic of functional forum features. This is local grocery store app level embarrassing.
I tried to imagine an explanation for why - assuming Substack has adequate money and technical talent - none of this gets fixed:
Maybe Substack doesn't want to make commenting more pleasant, because it would encourage more comments. Then, writers might find themselves doing more moderating and more responding, and thus write fewer new posts. But Substack probably thinks paid subscriptions are mainly caused by posts, rather than commenting. (As with most online communities, commenters here are a minority of subscribers.)
My local grocery store isn't that incompetent.
I sometimes think that the comment section was designed for a single level of "yay, you rock" comments, with an optional second layer of "thanks for reading".
Substack *only displays two comments* by default, so that seems accurate. Still, you'd think they could try to fix things for one of their biggest stars.
Agreed. Maybe we should try to do something about it?
I never thought I'd use 'my substack' for anything, but decided I might as well create a post on it, to initiate collaboration around the issue. Anyone who's interested, click on my profile image to get to it.
When I click on your name, I can see the "posts", "notes" and "likes", but unfortunately the comments are not there. :(
Does anyone know what's up with polymarket's US election market? With Michelle Obama at 7% and thousands of dollars on the order book, it seems too much like free money. What's the catch?
Currently Michelle Obama is 7.1% to be the next president on Betfair Exchange (£10m bet on the market; £360k on this candidate). She is also 10.2% to be the democratic nominee (£7m bet on the market; £190k on this candidate), which implies she has a 70% chance of winning if nominated. Both figures are based on the odds at which you could bet against her. If you think neither event will occur, you probably prefer to get an 11% return in 6 months than a 7% return in 10 months.
Alternatively, you could back Biden. His odds have shortened slightly in the past two days, but still imply a 69% chance he will be the nominee (with a chunky £5.8m of bets on this candidate), which you may think low. His implied chance of being the next president is 28% (with £2.9m of bets). This implies he as a 41% of winning if nominated. These figures are based on the odds at which you could bet for him.
Meanwhile, Trump (according to this market) is 91% likely to be the Republican nominee and 45% likely to be the next president, implying a 49% chance of winning if nominated.
Something looks wrong with those conditional probabilities, since in each case their most likely opponent is the other. Possibly worth considering backing both Trump and Biden to win: if you put £387 on Biden and £613 on Trump, you would make £373 (before commission) if either won, although of course you get rinsed if Michelle pulls through.
Possibly worth noting that Metaculus has Biden at 93% to be the nominee and Obama at 0.4%. Manifold has 91% and 1.5% respectively.
Is there any reason at all to think Michelle could be the candidate?
The reason we got Biden as a candidate, and then a president, is that almost all the people who weren't on the Trump Train fondly remembered the Obama presidency, and Biden's "I was the #2 man in the Obama administration; I can give you a calmer, more sedate Obama Lite" sold better than the specific pitches of any of the other Democratic candidates.
If Biden is out because of age/senility/whatever, which is probably north of 7%, then that leaves us with the #1 woman in the Obama administration, and probably the only other figure from that administration that most voters can remember off the top of their head. And "Four more years of Obama Lite; the alternative is four more years of The Donald", is probably almost as strong a pitch now as it was in 2020.
But Biden could back that with actually being an experienced, capable politician. Michelle can't, and I'm pretty sure that *will* matter. So I think she's overpriced at 7%, but I think I can see where that 7% is coming from.
Wasn't Hillary Clinton the #1 woman in the Obama administration, as Secretary of State? I believe that voters also remember her.
I don't think that anyone who is actually thinking about governance is considering Michelle Obama as a candidate here - they're just picking a name they think of based on thoughts like the First Lady counting somehow as part of the government.
Hillary wasn't in the administration at all during Obama's second term. And whether she was in the Senate, State, or on the lecture circuit, she was always the #1 woman in the Hillary Clinton Administration, on hold until it was Her Turn.
Yes, but Hillary looks old.
If they were going to replace Biden, the time to do that would have been *before* the primaries. People dropped a lot of stalking horses a year or two ago, but it never went anywhere. The only way he can not be the candidate now is if he literally drops dead.
The latest thinking, by Ross Douthat among others is that Biden waits till the convention to say something like “I could do the job but I’ve heard the will of the people.”
Then bow out for the good of the party and the country, letting all his pledged delegates come up with a replacement. He wouldn’t necessarily have to endorse Kamala Harris in that situation.
Conditional on it not being Biden, I'm seeing probabilities around:
Obama, 33%
Newsom, 28%
Harris, 20%
Warren, 5%
Whitmer, 4%
Phillips, 3%
Clinton, 2% (although I note that Clinton is much higher on PredictIt).
If the scenario is that Biden drops out at the convention, I'm confident Obama is much too high and Harris is much too low. But mostly, I think that won't happen (barring some major adverse event between then and now, the probability of which is well below 33%).
If he was going to do that, he would have done it last year. This is an absurd fantasy.
I had the same reaction 4 years ago, when a left-wing friend was breathlessly talking about the possibility of Michelle Obama running for President against Trump. I was completely disconnected from politics at the time, and reacted with obvious befuddlement, since she wasn't a politician and had no experience and her only qualification was being married to a guy who'd done it (which seemed profoundly anti-feminist). I forget exactly what my friend said in response, but I recall the expression on their face was as if no one had ever mentioned these objections to them. The subject was quietly dropped.
I eventually concluded that this friend had been listening to politics in an echo chamber, with some combination of a) starting to mistake the reactions in there for reactions in the outside world, and b) assuming that I was part of the same echo chamber (although they really should have known better, so that would be another form of blindness). Perhaps it was c) code for "let's let Barack run things for another 8 years", although I didn't detect any hint of that at the time, and in that case the expression might have meant "I thought you'd gotten the secret memo, but alas, you're literal-minded enough to miss the hidden meaning, which I am unwilling to say aloud".
I suspect that something like (a) is happening here, coupled with a norm within that group of putting your money where your mouth is (which is admirable).
> her only qualification was being married to a guy who'd done it (which seemed profoundly anti-feminist)
That sounds like taking proclaimed ideas too literally, which may be appreciated at places like ACX, but at most other places something qualifies as "anti-feminist" only when it is (a) bad for some woman, preferably an important one, or (b) good for her, but in a way that makes her focus less on her career and more on her family.
Yeah, I'm old-fashioned that way, and this is one of those "first-wave" things. I think it counts as anti-feminist to treat a woman purely as an extension of her husband.
Hillary Clinton was a great example. Love her or hate her, it's because of who she was and what she did.
Hillary got parachuted into a Senate seat because of who she was married to, then got to be Secretary of State for the same reason.
But by the time she was running for President she at least had experience in those two other jobs, even if those other jobs were not earned.
Michelle Obama has never done anything.
As far as I can see the reasoning (as articulated by Vivek Ramaswamy and others) is (a) Biden's mental faculties are declining, (b) the Democrats will at some point realise they need to replace him, (c) the obvious substitute would be Kamala Harris, but nobody likes her, (d) the Democrats would alienate their base if they overlooked a woman of colour, but (e) they can avoid this by nominating another woman of colour, i.e. Michelle Obama; in any case (f) they really want to run Barack again, but are prevented from doing so by the term limit and (g) Michelle can serve as a de facto cipher for her husband. How this could be done in practice is left as an exercise for the reader.
Some say the switch will take place after the convention, in which case betting against Obama (or for Biden) as nominee is still profitable, since the market will resolve when the convention takes place.
It should be obvious, but I do not endorse any of propositions (a)-(g). I merely report the argument as I have understood it.
There are rumors that the Democrats will switch from Biden to Obama at the convention. I've only heard this from Republican sources, not Democrats, so ... grain of salt, and all that.
Andrew Sullivan just wrote about it, so it's more than just the right-wing media, but I think those odds are overblown. Take the free money; lots of people on betting sites overreact to news stories.
I think there were good reasons for the Dems to try to move off Biden 6-12 months ago, his poll numbers certainly aren't what you'd hope for, but at this point the only way I can figure trying to replace him on the ticket is if he's actively declining. Like,
If Nov 23, he's at X brain farts/gaffes
In Feb 24, he's at 2X brain farts/gaffes
In Aug 24, he'll be at 8x brain farts/gaffes
If you're looking at that kind of decline in an 80+ year-old...yeah, pulling him from the ticket makes sense. That's the only way I can see him not being the Dem nominee though.
Andrew Sullivan has basically always identified as being on the right.
There are definitely rumours, and it's not an implausible scenario, but 7% seems high. Biden won't resign in his current state and he's unlikely to go that far downhill in the six months before the convention.
Besides, if they were going to make a serious play for Michelle Obama as candidate they'd be doing some battlespace preparation. Michelle Obama would be doing public appearances, making speeches, getting her face on television. And as far as I can figure out, she's not doing any of that stuff right now.
Yeah, it doesn't strike me as particularly likely, as it doesn't seem like it would fly with Independent voters, who would, I think, see it as 'gimmicky'.
I also don't think she would want to do it. They are, I believe, making a ton of money right now and are very popular (or at least regarded well). She doesn't necessarily seem power hungry, so I would think it would be mostly downside for her.
Yeah, I could see lots of serious thought about Biden alternatives, but she's not high on the list. Newsome is far more obvious, but so are a lot of current senators and governors who are at least in the spotlight somewhere and have personally done politics. I wouldn't say Michelle is at 0%, but not much above that.
The only scenario where Michelle pulls ahead is if we consider the DNC a conspiracy that has the power and willingness to rig the primaries completely behind the scenes such that their preferred candidate (who I assume is a pretend way to get her husband re-elected?) doesn't even have to try to appeal to anyone.
I think Gretchen Whitmer would be a smart choice. Intelligent, tested and sane. Plus she has the looks of ‘40s movie star.
The thinking, I believe, is that if you were to jump somebody over Harris, it would have to be a black woman, or there would be too much blowback.
And, even though Biden is looking not particularly fit, mentally or physically, he is the incumbent, and he did beat Trump last time they contested, so it would require something fairly drastic, I'd think, to try to get him off the ticket.
I don't know about Polymarket, but I heard that PredictIt had massively skewed odds for Trump in 2020, including people betting on him *even after Biden was sworn in as president*. With low betting limits and high fees, it's hard to correct low probabilities like that.
I bet £5k on Biden on 12 November 2020 and was paid £1,322.80 (after commission) on 17 December 2020. There was a huge amount of money in that market.
How much is the vig?
2% of winnings. This is on Betfair Exchange, with their Basic plan.
Also, that money would earn ~4% in risk-free interest in the meantime instead and be instantly available for other opportunities.
The Waiting Guy
Recently I had a somewhat strange experience. I'm sure it's perfectly normal, but it felt like the kind of thing that would appear at the start of a conspiracy thriller or ghost story if those were things that could actually happen.
When I went out for ice cream, there was a guy sitting on a bench on the sidewalk in front of the Apple Store. He didn't have anything to do other than occasionally check his phone and just sat there for forty minutes looking around for no apparent reason. He often looked at the Apple Store, and I guessed that he must be waiting for someone inside, although 40 minutes seemed like a long time for someone to be inside.
The strangest part is that right after I finished eating my ice cream 40 minutes later, just as I was preparing to leave, he abruptly got up and walked up the street ahead of me. He walked half a block up and disappeared inside a burger shop, so I thought he might be meeting someone there, but when I went inside right afterwards out of curiosity, there was no sign of him or anyone else he might have been meeting. He'd just vanished.
The best explanation I can think of is that he had to use the bathroom and immediately hid in the bathroom so I didn't see him, but that still doesn't explain why he sat outside for 40 minutes with nothing to do or why he went to that specific restaurant to use the bathroom. And it's probably for customers only anyway. The whole thing was very mysterious.
P.S. He also had a mask on the whole time (despite sitting outside), which itself is pretty uncommon nowadays.
You ate ice cream for FORTY minutes??
(My guess is he worked at the restaurant, was on break, and you and he just happen to time up in your actions. There is also probably another substack with a comment asking why a guy eating ice cream was staring at me for 40 minutes while i was on my lunch break then followed me into where I work.)
I wasn't staring at him. I spent most of my time looking at the Apple Store too.
I used to work at a movie theater. One day I saw a bunch of Waffle House employees come in, buy some of our overpriced Coke, and leave without seeing a movie. They get free Coke at their own workplace, and it was impossible to get to that movie theater without driving past a Waffle House.
Reminds me of a sight at a bus station long ago; a guy was using the pay phone there, and then he hung up, and pulled out his cell phone to call someone.
Likely illegal activity. I have heard that major telephone companies pulled pay phones not because they were unprofitable, but because they were used significantly (large majority?) for criminal activity.
If he was very focused on the Apple Store, could be he worked for one of the companies that employ people just to count footfall, with hedge funds, competitors or even the store itself paying for the data (although imagine nowadays the store could probably do it much more cheaply with some cameras and software).
I needed to get my ipad repaired recently. They give you a time slot to see a technician. Then, often, they tell you they're running late and here is your new time slot. So, guy sitting outside the Apple Store for 40 minutes seems normal. Also: guy waits for 40 minutes and then needs to visit the restroom sounds normal.
If so, why not use the Apple restroom?
Have you been reading a lot of Philip K Dick lately?
Nope. I take it his stories have elements like this?
By coincidence I’m reading one of his novels now, ‘VALIS’. It’s actually pretty good. I don’t know it’s your cup of tea but here is a link to it’s Wikipedia page.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valis_(novel)
Yeah, old sci fi guy. A lot of what the hell is going on here stuff. Your comment seems mildly paranoid. PDK made a good living on stories that were very paranoid.
I was joking.
That reminds me of an experience I had recently. I was sitting in front of the Apple Store minding my own and I saw a guy eating an ice cream. No big deal there, you might think, but he was eating an ice cream for a full forty minutes. Who the heck takes forty minutes to eat an ice cream?
Then he tried to follow me to the bathroom.
I too was intrigued by the 40-minute ice cream. Doesn't it melt? Was this a single ice cream or was this "I finished one scoop, let me return and purchase another" kind of thing?
It was a double in a waffle cone.
Drug deal?
I am told that ice cream is the perfect food for coming down of off fentanyl. Never tried it myself, though. And really, ice cream is the perfect food for a number of situations.
‘The Good Thief’ Nick Nolte plays a heroin addict. To temporarily kick the habit he lays in a supply of ice cream and has someone handcuff him to his bed.
I like ice cream a little too much myself so limit myself to a pint for breakfast once a year on my birthday. Only 8 or so months to go.
"Ice cream: almost as good as heroin." might make a good advertising slogan, in some slightly different parallel universe.
If you don’t taste it very often it’s pretty amazing. The first bite is peak pleasure though.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iECwVCFjmqc
The way the baby's eyes widen after the first taste is incredibly cute.
This is a high foot-traffic downtown area, and also the Apple Store hires a police officer to constantly be on guard right there, so it's pretty much the worst possible place you could pick. (Although oddly, the police officer was eating dinner across the street at the time, something I've never seen before.)
If there's one thing Breaking Bad taught me, it's that you want to do your meet somewhere in a public place. Way less chance someone sticks a gun in your face and takes your money or your dope.
Seems like the top level domain of this Substack is still broken/a placeholder: https://astralcodexten.com/.
A proper solution would be a permanent redirect from "astralcodexten.com" to "www.astralcodexten.com"; not sure whether Substack or Scott needs to implement it.
Periodically I see people link to Sam Kriss in these open threads, and I wanted to drop a link to his most recent post, which is one of the best things I've read in months
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/manifesto-of-the-armed-front-of-love
He has opinions about polyamory, which has been discussed here a lot again lately, but the piece is much more than that
not sure it works, romantic love is obsessive yes, but the terrorism doesn't work as an extreme metaphor. The lovers always face each other, and the demands are often more about the desire than the result. you also need a self first to love and be loved-you don't gain one by loving.
if the point is polyamory is a shallow connection and monogamy is deeper, it could be said better. i still dont agree, the danger is you still get deep connection but with only one of the polycule. You get power differential and one person in sadness. its more you can't just banish jealousy or the connective aspects of sex.
Is it much more than that?
I actually took it as fairly nihilistic - he points to a love so all consuming, morality and human decency is thrown away. But it's a near-certainty he himself hasn't and isn't experiencing such a love, because he's not dead or in jail. Indeed, it's a certainty even if somehow a small slice of humanity had a culture like the one depicted where "acts of terrorism and mass murder is how you demonstrate your love," it would diminish much more quickly than any religion from the *inside,* much less the outside.
Sure, he makes the obligatory handwave to poly being "shallow lukewarm puddles" vs the real incandescent and consuming fires of *ACTUAL* love, but the "actual" love he's pointing to is an unattainable, unsustainable shibboleth that nobody in their right mind ever experiences, thus handwaving away both poly and the real-world love that monogamous people feel.
I mean, I guess I could be wrong - um - for the other people here, is this what real-world love feels like to *you?* You would commit acts of mass murder and terrorism for it?
Otherwise, straight nihilism and a dismissal of basically ALL real world love, whether poly or monogamous.
I also, perhaps because I'm very interested in Charles Taylor's notion of the buffered self, I think the part about love as "feeling out the outer edges that define your self in the form of the other" is really central to understanding what the essay is getting at. Much more central than the all-consuming terrorist love that sets it up.
So if you're not familiar with Sam's writing, I don't think people read him or like him with any expectation that he's saying factually true or reasonable things. It's rather that he has a gift for saying ridiculous, extravagant things that draw one in to a sharp point of insight.
The terrorism is a frame story. "But tell us—what are you more afraid of? The possibility that the realisation of your freedom and the purpose of your existence lies outside the bounds of yourself? Or—a bomb?" The Armed Front is using acts of violence to draw people's attention to the ways that therapeutic safetyist mindsets are reinforcing the buffered self against the possibility of real, satisfying love. The inclusion of the Armed Front in the essay is doing the same thing. The 'unattainable, unsustainable shibboleth' and the manifesto framing are there to heighten contrast, not to tell you that that's what love is or is supposed to be. I don't think the essay is saying that real love between persons should express itself in unlimited atrocity. It's saying that real, committed, vulnerable love between persons should be -more like- the nihilism of the chivalric terrorists than the nihilism of self-help affirmations. i.e. "The Somme-heavy barrage of helpful, healthful messaging, here to inform you that you should not seek your self-realisation in and through other people, because other people will always disappoint you. For your own wellbeing, you should avoid allowing anyone to happen to you."
Thanks - if that's the thrust of it you were getting out of it, I don't think he's doing it well for people like me who don't regularly read him.
Everything's a gradient. He's posited two endcaps on the gradient, both of them clearly bad. All this florid verbiage and wide-eyed detail is to merely argue that you should be a few ticks closer to the *right* end, not the *left* end?
BORING. Also, not very well communicated.
And like any gradient, the span of humanity is going to be distributed across the gradient, regardless of what he writes or recommends. Arguing in a Straussian way for being a few ticks closer to his end doesn't seem very insightful or likely to drive anyone to change their actions in the ways he wants.
But then, I'm clearly not the target audience here.
So... there's a criticism of expectations of socially-constructed demonstrations of love? If everyone else were committing acts of terrorism as an expression of love, wouldn't you go along, because otherwise what would your beloved say?
So, not satisfied with Microsoft's paltry billions, Sam Altman seems to be asking the UAE for seven *trillion* dollars to build lots of new high-end chip fabs. This strikes me as roughly equivalent to 1960s Dr. Evil asking for "one hundred billion dollars!", and everybody laughs because there's not that much money in the world. OK, I missed the bit where they redefined M1 a few years ago and there's now a bit over twenty trillion dollars in (mostly virtual) circulation; he's only asking for one-third of all the dollars in the world.
And yes, I get that he's not literally asking for a supertanker full of dollars; he's looking for capital broadly defined and in many forms. It still doesn't pass the giggle test; I talked about this with people I know in the AI and chip-manufacturing fields, and there are too many parts of this plan that aren't going to work. First off, the combined sovereign wealth funds of all the petrostates don't quite reach the seven-terabuck level, and they're not all going to give everything to Sam Altman no matter what he promises. Second, the semiconductor industry can't usefully absorb that level of investment in much less than a generation. We don't have the people, or the tooling, or the resources, and we don't have the people to train the people or the tools to build the tools on less than a generational timescale. And even if you handwave seven trillion dollars' worth of chip fabs into existence, we don't have the electric power generation capacity to run all those chips (and the associated cooling stacks).
So, what is Sam up to? The simplest, easiest answer is that he's just trolling us, generating bullshit or hype for whatever purpose. That seems unsatisfactory as an explanation, but it's possible.
If he imagines that he's actually going to get the seven trillion dollars, I'm pretty sure he's wrong. If he thinks that, given the seven trillion dollars, the stuff he wants to buy with it will be available in the marketplace, I'm pretty sure he's wrong. And if the plan is that he's going to manage the construction of a vertically-integrated industrial economy on the scale of Israel or Sweden so as to build all the stuff he wants to buy, then yeah, he's wrong and mocking laughter is warranted.
Is there something else he might be up to that's not laughably wrong? Or at least wrong in some interesting way I haven't thought of?
Also, this suggests that Sam Altman seems to believe that, in order to achieve his goal, he thinks he needs seven trillion dollars' worth of computronium. Well, of computronium-manufacturing capability, so probably tens of trillions of dollars worth of computronium. And lots of new power plants.
If Sam Altman's goal is "build a true AGI", or maybe ASI, does that mean he thinks true AGI/ASI requires more computronium than sensible people think is going to exist in the next twenty years?
$ 7 trillion all at once is of course laughable. But if the idea is a continuous ramp-up of investments, over the course of a few decades, then it's not necessarily so crazy. The US interstate system seems to have cost $0.5 trillion (in somewhat recent dollars). This would be an investment 14 times as big. There are those who would claim it's 14 times as important.
If that's the case, the crazy part is bringing up now money you don't expect to need for twenty years. The people who might invest in twenty years aren't in the audience, and you're weakening the near-term pitch for the people who are.
It's possible that Altman would have made that mistake, but unlikely that the WSJ wouldn't have commented on it.
It is rather putting the cart before the horse. What do you need a fab for, if you don't have a design. If you have a design, you can find custom fabs.
As you alluded to, one doesn't merely buy a fab and do great things. You start out with a purpose. Along the way, you develop some objectives. You're working with system architects, circuitry architects, then transistor architects. Then you discover some of the objectives can't be met with the custom fabs available. So you get to work with the photo-lithography vendors to see what tools, materials, designs they may be working on, which together you can tailor to fit your needs. Then you are into fab materials, fab processes, and you're working at the cutting edge, hiring employees away from the photo-lithography vendors, having your employees hired away by the photo-lithography vendors, and back and forth with the competition, and you're making test runs and you've got a validation center, and design automation teams, and mask designers, and probably about ten thousand people in your organization .... and then we'll talk about conducive geographies, and somewhere way down the line, ten billion dollars to build a state of the art fab.
I think the short answer here is that Altman hasn't asked for seven trillion dollars and the media headlines are just misleading.
Oh my, this is like 99% of journalism, and that's before GPT started writing it all.
Actually, GPT may improve the state of journalism, because it will be able to write stories based on facts (and only occasionally hallucinate something), as opposed to needing to invent things all the time. But that will all depend on who writes the prompts.
This is an extraordinarily optimistic view of the usage of large language models and AI in general. This is akin to saying, "with the advent of the internet and true facts being at our fingertips, journalists will really only report the truth because the truth will be so readily available, without requiring all the hard reading and travel that classic investigation required." Yeah, it doesn't work like that, and neither will our new big tool.
I'm sorry if I missed you being sarcastic or facetious. Well done if so.
> Oh my, this is like 99% of journalism, and that's before GPT started writing it all.
Hot take: this is AIs first clumsy attempt at manipulating humans into giving it the ressources it needs to achieve super-intelligence and, subsequently, world domination.
>Is there something else he might be up to that's not laughably wrong? Or at least wrong in some interesting way I haven't thought of?
Well, the last thread was talking about Elon Musk's payment deal getting scuttled due to lack of negotiating from the other party, so from the armchair it looks like Sam's ensuring people will come back with smaller numbers at it will look more like a back-and-forth. It's "Queen's Duck" chicanery for bureaucratic checkmarking.
What number could he be pursuing for which $7 trillion is too much but not out of the ballpark? $1 trillion? That's still way too high for anything useful that one guy or organization could ever use. That's enough to buy the entire semiconductor sector already. If you're going to do that, then go sign a deal with someone major in that sector and coordinate to get the money together. It's cheaper and comes with institutional backing.
That only works if the initial numbers are modestly too high, not ludicrously too high, As noted below, if you ask for a million-dollar starting salary in your first job out of college, this does not ensure that people "come back with smaller numbers", rather it ensures that they stop taking your phone calls.
You'd probably have to adjust the analogy to: the most well known college graduate in the world asking for that salary.
But it's not the equivalent of a white collar job, it's the equivalent of a pay raise for the hiring manager.
From some quick googling, the most respectable news article using the words "$7 trillion" seems to be this one https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altman-seeks-trillions-of-dollars-to-reshape-business-of-chips-and-ai-89ab3db0 -- it needs a subscription but the relevant part is before the paywall.
The whole paragraph is: "The OpenAI chief executive officer is in talks with investors including the United Arab Emirates government to raise funds for a wildly ambitious tech initiative that would boost the world’s chip-building capacity, expand its ability to power AI, among other things, and cost several trillion dollars, according to people familiar with the matter. The project could require raising as much as $5 trillion to $7 trillion, one of the people said"
So the big headline number comes down to an unnamed source talking about an unspecified project. It sounds like a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Ultimately I don't think there's a lot of point in over-interpreting it.
There's definitely sometimes advantages to anchoring big numbers in people's minds, though. Especially if you're talking to middle eastern sovereign wealth funds, whose main problem is that they have too much money to invest sensibly.
>So the big headline number comes down to an unnamed source talking about an unspecified project. It sounds like a back-of-the-envelope calculation.
Yeah, this sounds like it could have gone through several levels of misinterpretation too.
One wild thought: Normally I think of massive computation for LLMs as the training costs. What if Altman expects to have full AGI in a few years, and this is a calculation for the _inference_ computation costs to replace some large fraction of the total global workforce?
But they *don't* have that much money to invest, sensibly or otherwise. That's the point, or part of it. I think most of the money they do have is sensibly invested in diverse portfolios, but it doesn't matter whether it's sensible or not, the seven trillion dollars for chip fabs just isn't realistically available.
And there's no advantage to anchoring ridiculously bid numbers in people's minds. Seriously, the whole "ask for the stars and they'll give you the Moon!" thing really does not work. What Altman seems to be doing, is akin to asking for an entry-level white-collar job with a starting salary of one million dollars per year. This does not "anchor" you in the hiring manager's mind as a superstar that he should be trying to scrape together $500K/year for, it just makes him roundfile your resume and go on to the next one.
I can pretty much guarantee that there are many reasonable proposals for the couple hundred billion dollars the UAE will want to invest over the coming year. And plenty more unreasonable ones to be quickly roundfiled. Probably including Altman's.
No, they don't have seven trillion, but they do have a lot of money. And if you start talking about a business opportunity that can easily absorb trillions (but which can definitely totally do great things for ten billion) then they might be interested.
And you're right, "anchoring" doesn't always work, which is why I said it sometimes works. You need to apply it very judiciously, but it's a legit strategy. Since Sam Altman appears to be a better businessman than I am, I won't nitpick his use of it.
I also don't think anything in the article suggests that it is $7 trillion in one year - its almost not certainly. A project that would be $7 trillion over 40 years is, yeah gigantic but doable. If the number was said at all - which is dubious - it was a parameter across time as well as projects.
Yes, my guess would be that Altman said something along the lines of, "We'll eventually want a total of $7T investment over the next X years, right now we're looking for $Y in our series A round, do you want in?"
That's still an incredibly poor pitch. If you tell your prospective investors that you think you'll need $7E12 to succeed, then your prospective investors will assume that since there isn't $7E12 for you to have nor any reasonable place to put it, you're going to fail. In which case, their lesser up-front investment will just be getting them in on the ground floor of a failure.
Or, if "X years" is long enough for the economy to grow to the point where $7E12 investments are a thing, then you're saying that you are working to much longer time horizons than they are, and what's their exit strategy if they need to cash out in five years?
This probably the wrong place to ask but has pro football become less brutal in the last 20 or 30 years? I watched the end of the Super Bowl last night - to see if the Taylor Swift psyop succeeded. ;-) - and it looked a lot less bone crunching than I remember.
Yeah, I think the long term effects of suffering repeated hits to the head are better understood today than they were 30 years ago. There's also the fact that as salaries for players have gone up and up and up, the cost of losing players for extended periods of time to injury has also gone up, which has led to rule changes to try to make the game safer.
Yeah, all pro sports are trying to limit player injuries. The NFL has all sorts of rules about how you are allowed to hit/ block/ tackle another player. Fighting is way down in hockey and less 'nasty' hits. (not that all the violence doesn't still happen.)
On the one hand the rules have shifted to penalize some types of hits that were legal, and/or shrugged off by the officials, during lets say the 1970s-1990s. So you don't see those nearly as often.
Meanwhile though the players are somewhat bigger and are much faster at a lot of positions. I.e. the foot speed that a Lawrence Taylor had as a linebacker which was exceptional in the 1980s is now just normal for that position in the NFL. And since basic physics hasn't changed -- kinetic energy still equals mass times velocity squared -- the amount of force being delivered in routine hits today is significantly greater than back in the day.
A similar dynamic has played out in my household's fave pro sport, ice hockey. A lot of the routine hacking/slashing/fistfights has been legislated out. But meanwhile the median NHL skater is both somewhat larger and _much_ faster than 30 years ago, and they've all come up through levels of youth hockey in which "finish your checks" is as basic in the coaching as "head on a swivel" or whatever. So if you go back and watch some 1980s/90s NHL hockey on YouTube it will seem downright gentle in terms of physicality compared to today -- until somebody shoves somebody from behind into the boards and the line brawl breaks out. (And then most fans only remember the line brawls.)
This is the best answer. The players are much better so the offenses and defenses have moved away from smashing into each other all the time. And the NHL has opened things up so much that players can actually skate and score goals instead of just dumping it in all the time.
Personally, I think both sports are much better for these changes. The NBA I think has gone too far and reduced physical defense too much, but I am not really a fan so its not my business really.
Oh dear, Re NHL, long time Sabres fan (we won't talk about the current team, sigh.) But there was much more fighting back in the 80-90's. Isn't that the Rob Ray (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Ray) time in Buffalo? As a Sabres fan I love Rob, but I'm also glad his 'position' is mostly gone from the current line up.
Big difference between physicality in checking and fighting. The best offensive player of this generation (Ovi) is quite possibly the best checking forward as well. That was definitely not the case in the past.
I grew up in the town that houses the US hockey hall of fame. I was a terrible disappointment to my hockey loving friends and relatives. One year of PeeWee and my coach told my parents that I was too tall and skinny and was probably going to get hurt. :(
Why do I perceive people talking about sports to sound dumb? Is it because I’ve chosen to think sports knowledge is a waste of synapses, or is there something to it? I find sports talk particularly vacuous because it seems like dumb talk that tries to sound smart, full of technical speak and numbers.
>Is it because I’ve chosen to think sports knowledge is a waste of synapses,
You literally sound like a parody of a fedora dude
Possibly because you've absorbed cultural signals that say that jocks are dumb and nerds are smart? Your point about "smart talk with lots of numbers and stats that's actually vacuous" could apply equally well to a lot of other hobbies (e.g. Warhammer 40K, video games, certain types of people who are really into politics).
My brother went through the NFL questions on Manifold with my father and bet on those whose probability had a large difference compared to the probability my father claimed. He got a 30% gain in total. Sports fans might be dumb, but apparently they are smarter than the state of the art technology for predicting the futute.
IMO, "Manifold says..." would be usefully replaced with "a poll of Bay Area prediction market nerds says..."
To some extent, this: https://xkcd.com/904/
But also, most conversations aren't really very insightful, and I think we don't tend to notice when the topic interests us.
Because everyone can enjoy it, which means the average person enjoying sports is roughly as smart as the average American...which is pretty dumb. More horrific still, if you go to a bar to enjoy a game with average Americans, you will notice to your horror that half the people are dumber than the average American, some are even almost as dumb as the French.
Whereas connoisseurs of the finer things in life, like us, can understand the intricacies of D&D and engage in hours of joyous, stimulating debate over the advantages of 5th edition vs 3.5 edition (3rd is simply worse) while hopping we don't awaken the true gentlemen of class who actually understand Thac0.
Straight up, the best thing about football is that it gives me something to talk about with 90% of men in awkward social situations where social custom demands I make mouth sounds with someone I share no interests in common with. This is unironically amazing and super valuable. There are tons of really solid guys I like and respect but...I'm a giant nerd and they're not and it's nice to have something to talk with them about. But it does mean that sports is basically the only time I interact with dumb people, despite the fact that there are some super smart sports guys.
What is confusing about THAC0? I’ve never understood the hate.
It involves subtraction, instead of only addition.
It's mostly a joke. I think the big issue, from memory, isn't complexity but an almost obnoxious counter-intuitiveness. Like Armor Class. Everywhere else in life, big number is gooder, smaller number is badder. It's not complex to invert that, it's just annoying.
I love sports, but let's just talk about something else then. I love hiking in the woods. What do you do for fun?
Hey pal, Steph Curry’s 3 point shots are a thing of rare beauty. - yeah the implied irritation is feigned for comic effect but those shots really are somethin’
But more seriously the counting and summing neurons approach to Utilitarian ends - to non true believers at least - seems pretty vacuous too.
You’re just not that interested in sports and that’s just fine.
I don't know what sort of sports talk you have been listening to, but one possibility is that the participants are (consciously or unconsciously) aiming at goals that are different from the goals you typically aim at in conversation. For example, it may be more important for the participants to express (and thus share) their enthusiasm for the sport in general, for a particular team, player, or game, than to state true facts and make "good" arguments (evaluated according to the standards of truth-seeking dialogue).
This is a very good point. When two people are talking about the Super Bowl, if you squint, it kind of sounds like a thoughtful argument with a lot of evidence, but upon further inspection it doesn’t hold.
Do you have a specific example of what sounds dumb?
I don't follow sports at all, but when I do hear guys like Bill Simmons and Klosterman talk nba or football, they sound more like geeks than idiots. Maybe it's just the case that the appeal is so wide, idiots like it too.
I think Quiop got it. It’s a type of conversation that has the qualities of a sophisticated argument (e.g.: data), but which is in fact entertainment. It’s the contrast that does it for me.
Is the spelling bee dumb? Math olympiad? They are involved practicing solutions to known problems.
That doesn't seem like a phenomenon that would be unique to sports.
It seems attorneys are still valuable given Scott is happy to pay the normal rate, but for other services he often requests the service provider give freely. Or maybe I am misremembering.
If you're gonna call someone out, maybe cite at least one example?
My mistake, it was meant as a comment on the relative value of the legal profession vs others, not as a callout. To your question, I thought I'd seen a few volunteer requests in previous open threads, but it seems I was misremembering. Thanks for the thought provocation.
No you're not misremembering. Scott does ask for help on a volunteer basis occasionally. Most recently in open thread 310:
"I‘m looking for an EEG expert, a TCMS expert, and a very-finicky-high-level statistics expert to (on a volunteer basis) review certain ACX Grants proposals."
Just to be clear, I don't think there's anything at all wrong with him doing that.
Agreed that there’s nothing wrong it. I suspect the difference is that there he’s looking for volunteers for a charitable project, which he happens to be organizing. Here, he probably feels more like he’s asking on his own behalf. If it’s for a similar project that pours cold water on my theory, but there’s also a difference in norms around what people expect to volunteer for vs what they expect to get paid for (and our intuitions on that are fuzzy).
Additionally the "tax benefits of charitable giving" are a real quantity of money directly in his pocket. Of course I am happy to pay someone 200 dollars to save me 20,000 dollars - while asking for a volunteer for some nebulously profitable project makes a lot of sense.
Thanks! :)
I helped Scott deal with DNS issues and he offered to pay me. So I don't think that's true.
Cool, thanks for the correction :)
Does anyone have suggestions for resources to learn just enough C++ to port a sketch/simple library from the old Arduino uno AVR architecture to work on either an ESP8266 based board or an arduino R4 board (yes I realize that these are two different chips with two different architectures, I don't need both, just either/or)?
My current programming experience is all in either R or python, and my small amount of googling hasn't turned up anything that seems really accessible to learning C++, especially as relevant to these micro-controllers.