Waterluvian

I loved beaming stuff between Newtons as a kid.

I love thinking about the idea of sending uber low bitrate memes during some boring meeting.

If the government shouldn’t press its thumb on the scale at the start (fair to argue!) then it shouldn’t press its thumb on the scale when they demand a bailout.

I’m not sure it’s a binary thing that contradicts.

I want AI and these companies to succeed. And I especially want new companies to succeed. But I want them to be valued far more realistically. Because if they have to be worth trillions, then there’s a real motivation to do what it takes to realize that valuation. And that’s how you birth a Zuckerberg.

I’m not rooting for them to fail. I’m rooting for the correction to happen sooner than later.

You can’t ace a test and still fail.

You can ace an interview and not get hired.

Review family photo albums and the stories told at gatherings.

Watching Star Trek TNG as a kid, I vividly recall hearing Geordi or Data often say things like "run a level 3 diagnostic on the Worf Barrels" or whatever to the computer and wonder what the heck that would even be. I wondered where are all ship devops and programmers were hidden. Though I recall the one accurate part was Barclay in the Holodeck spending most of the time setting up his IDE.

Now I think I kind of have an answer. Maybe the level of diagnostic refers to the LLM effort level. Great. So then what are all the people on the Enterprise actually doing? My guess is they're all just being people and doing people stuff like exploring the galaxy and smugfacing the Romulans. It would be easier to just create a race of Datas to do it safer. The Datas could probably be Bluetoothed to the Ship's Computer for even more optimization.

I think some of the struggle is that as we summit each subsequent hill of challenge, the sunset (or is it a sunrise?) is becoming inescapably bright. We're faced with that big ol' "what's the point of all this?" question. What's the point of studying math? What's the point of exploring the galaxy? What's the point of standing under a stack of blue barrels?

I'm not a math guy. I dunno if a Fields medal comes with free Taco Bell for life or something else that would truly move me. But I love that I get to read books and learn cool things and feel that spark of joy when my understanding expands, even if the ending is right there with nothing stopping me from skipping to it.

The problem is that enjoyment has, oddly enough, been misallocated to all the liminal spaces and moments in life. So most optimization tends to elide enjoyment.

Enjoyment elision is the number one cause of meat suit user dissatisfaction. The engineers insist it's not a compiler design bug, stating that those moments of enjoyment are, in fact, unreachable. The UX team says it's not the user's fault either, as it's a fully intended UX choice. The current proposed solution is to push this issue upstream, requesting that all enjoyment be moved from the journey to the destination.

I can't speak for your region but not failing younger kids isn't political here. It's a response to the developed understanding that doing so has worse outcomes, not better. At younger ages there is a much broader range on skill development. My oldest was reading chapter books in Grade 1 and my youngest is still struggling with basic sentences in Grade 3. The solution is that he's allocated some 1:1 time with a teacher who focuses on the weaker spots.

Holding kids back a grade is really just a sloppy solution. It kind of speaks to, "we have nothing to offer. The best we can do is just teach you the same stuff again." It's essentially a sign of bad, or underfunded education.

How old are they?

When I was a kid, our 1-6 grades were letters (E, G, S, N) that generally corresponded to "above, at, below, well below expectations" The point was to detect what needed extra attention and to help guide focus of the parents and teachers. 30 years later my kids have the same thing but the labels are a bit different. Grades 7-8 introduce A-F and then high school is just percentages.

I've also seen the opposite in a relative's reaction to their kid getting number grades. They fixated far too much 3 or 4 points either way and not the general signal.

Timmins is 3 hours!

Take a peek at Churchill Falls NL. They’re upgrading it to something like 14,000MW. You can see the hydro corridor on the satellite imagery. It goes for hundreds of KM to get to the customers.

I’m just not convinced that the frontier logistics are a real problem for an industry that’s supposed to be worth trillions.

Ahh don’t worry about it. We’ll leave you a crate of Whisky, too.

Mark’s a bit busy… but I actually chatted about this with the hockey parents at the rink this morning. They’re anti data center mainly because they just feel the companies (apparently they think it’s all Google and Facebook and have no clue Anthropic or OpenAI is a thing) will ruin the town and cause blackouts and ruin the water pressure (our water pressure is kinda weak). When I suggested “what about like an hour north of Sudbury?” they went from negative to I’d say indifferent. Except our goalie’s mom who was a hard no under any circumstances.

What I found interesting was that none of them had a single thing to say about the actual AI tech. Mind you n=6 or 7.

By and large we aren’t hesitant to take a portion of the remaining 80% of undeveloped Canada and do useful things with it. I can’t speak for all Canadians but that’s just not been a point of contention.

The amount of surveyed untapped hydro potential is something like 110GW. Though to be fair I haven’t studied any of this too deeply since grad school (which I refuse to let my brain appraise how long ago that was.)

Just pretend there’s an ocean and lay fibre. Bell does it to my lawn already.

If there’s really trillions of dollars of market cap to be had, why not just build in the middle of nowhere northern Québec and Ontario and build your own damn dams and infrastructure?

You’ve got a ton of water. A ton of famously cheap hydro electricity potential. An entire service industry for remote mines (who will build your roads and power). And you’re not being an unwanted bastard.

My sense is that the answer is very simple: because they can just use someone else’s.

The overwhelming majority of people who use USB sticks for things are likely aware of security and the concept of encryption. But the idea of being able to use “free software cryptography on top” may as well be a trip to Mars.

It reminds me that the mediocrity of an enormous amount of the U.S. is really quite voluntary. Enormous potential. Enormous wealth. Just cannot figure out how to socialize the prosperity.

I’m curious what that would practically look like in Python.

I bet this would be a good use of vibe coding. Experiment with what-ifs. I can imagine being able to “show not tell” and reduce the signal-to-noise of comment opinions.

The distinction between civil vs. criminal was the core of my comment. Sure they can be sued. But what exactly would they be prosecuted for?

The customers surely have standing to sue Binance. But to close the gap between what you feel should happen and what could actually happen… exactly what crime could they be prosecuted for?

The complete opposite is the generally held perspective among engineers where I work. It’s the management that think they’re not going to crater.

Knowing modern medicine, it's quite possible for either case to be true. The test could be biased and the guidelines are misleading or useless for different demographics (I think any demographc that isn't upper class white male have at least one story to tell about this). Or that a population of people could quite generally benefit from more vitamin D.

I think it would be somewhat unsurprising if we find that genes that evolved for one climate are not ideal when migrated to another climate. Especially when we live much longer lives and these kinds of issues are much more relevant to our expected quality of life (ie. how would you know you're vitamin D deficient when you're a peasant who is everything deficient?) Which is all me just saying, I wouldn't be surprised if vitamin D deficiency, which is directly related to sunlight exposure, is a prevalant issue now that humans migrate so much more freely than ever before.

I've marvelled about this at times. This huge list of vitamins the body cannot formulate itself, but is fully designed to make good use of... but also doesn't just immediately crash and go offline if they're lacking. And how the body can hold onto these molecules/atoms for re-use over years and years.

I need the company to have skin in the game, so I prefer that I am entirely unreachable outside M-F 9-5. Otherwise they just exploit people who submit far too quickly to being on-call 24/7. It also gives me motivation to make my stuff work as best as possible so that I'm not being annoyed by management about my non-existence outside core hours.

But I really do need the company to have a competent plan for handling issues that isn't just, "call the developer." It's amazing how much it makes them care about proper support and testing when the alternative isn't exploiting a developer, but is a customer outage.

I don't disagree, but the way you say that makes my eye twitch uncontrollably. So many of us have spent the better part of those 17 years trying to get the crypto proponents to have a real discussion about it.

> safe from dictatorial countries.

Yeah, that's definitely an argument. But it's kind of funny when the backdrop is that $6B was taken by North Korea.

It feels like a sibling to the popular attitudes towards not trusting big banks, or voting for <candidate> who demonstrably achieves the opposite of what you're seeking, or feeling that democracy ain't working out great, or that vaccines are scary and dangerous. There's just a fundamental lack of higher-order thinking. It's all vibe-based reasoning. What feels scary is what guides these behaviours. Which, I think, is why it's so unsurprising that people in these camps make such unbelievably strong candidates for exploitation.

By definition maybe they’re more risk tolerant. But I’m not sure they consciously identify as that.

I’m not sure there’s anything that evokes a more discordant set of emotions in me than an optimistic cancer fighter. I feel fear, frustration, hope, joy, confusion, anger…

When I was a teen I watched my mom battle cancer to a draw. Only in my late 30s did the repressed memories start returning. I got to remember her voice again, but I also got to remember the rest. And now my only plan is to just not get cancer, because it’s all far too much to even think about.

I don’t pity Craig, I envy him. I’m jealous, even. Because he’s discovered or was always imbued with the power to fight an unfair battle on his terms. If it’s ever my turn I hope I can be like him.

Meanwhile monitors and I’m sure many TVs specifically have a policy of up to X dead pixels not counting as defective for the sake of returns.

Prior to this process, aluminum basically didn’t exist naturally and was incredibly hard to refine from bauxite.

It’s wild how not long ago aluminum was an unbelievably rare, valuable metal, and now it’s ubiquitous and cheap.

The intense electricity requirement is also why recycling aluminum is not just an environmental activity: it’s a profitable one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall%E2%80%93H%C3%A9roult_proc...

I don’t have anything more to add to this discussion but I can’t stress enough how much I appreciate you taking the time to share this. I enjoyed reading your perspective and I’ve got a few notes here I want to go study a bit. You took a fairly thin thought I had and gave it depth, which I can consider more fully.