anvil-on-my-toe

If you're a slave in antebellum North Carolina, you have rosin on-hand and an open fire, no oven. You can cook your potatoes on the hot coals and ash or boil them in water in a pot. This method might have been more thermally efficient than either of those options and resulted in a nicer inner texture, while also conveniently sealing the cooked potato in a waxy later so it could be consumed later.

Is this the introduction of native call recording on iPhone? I've always had to use an app to record calls.

It's either smell, body heat, or easy access to skin. Maybe you sweat more than your wife, or the compounds in your sweat are more attractive to mosquitos, or maybe her hygiene is better.

The smelliest parts of people are the sweat glands and mouth. I pay extra care to my smell when archery hunting by keeping my teeth brushed and using wet wipes on sweaty areas. Eating an apple also helps neutralize mouth odor.

Better to whole-ass one thing than half-ass two things. Sleep allows a focused effort on cellular repair, garbage collection, memory consolidation, and learning.

The 24-hour dark-light cycle on Earth is the most energetically significant thing that happens here, and species capitalize on the parts of the day that play to their strengths.

No, purchasing power is down. Costs of living have gone up more than median wages. How much gold can you buy with USD today vs. 10 years ago? Less because the USD is worth less than it was. How much housing can you buy with $100,000 or with 1,000 hours of labor? Less housing.

Young people are objectively doing bad. Not trying to be depressing, but economically, behaviorally, health-wise, (at the median) they are worse off than their parents.

Phrases like "the American economy is booming" or "America is out-performing Europe..." are simplistic and ridiculous. My least favorite part of getting a degree in economics was the endless story-telling that pretends to be scientific. "America" is not equivalent to the asset portfolios of the richest 1% of the population. Just say what you're measuring (rich people's wealth) and don't try to dress it up as a measure of a thriving nation. Don't call it "America" or "the economy", call it GDP.

Purchasing power is down, birth rates are down, life expectancies are down, young people's expectations of the future are down. We should account for things we care about when we talk about how the country is doing.

How does that compare to the CEO's annual comp?

More like having a drug dealer in your AA group.

I wonder if you need to account for body language to get that figured out. A technical conversation on the phone is usually not as fluid as in-person.

Advice and verbal axioms like "eat more vegetables" probably don't work because they don't operate at the level of emotions and imagery, they're just words. People are not as rational as they like to think they are.

Sewing is a primitive skill that I think gets overlooked. If you spend enough time backpacking, you'll eventually end up with a hole in something, and realize how useful it is to have a needle and thread in your kit.

Yesterday I fixed a tear in a leather seat in my car by sewing it; such a simple way to feel productive and resourceful.

That cave location looks like such a prime piece of real-estate for a Paleolithic hunter group.

A legal fiction.

I meant it as a matter-of-fact observation. The headline was changed after my comment, but it was "Why We’re Deeply Invested in Making AI Better at Math Tutoring".

The "why" is obvious, it's cheaper than paying people, and the article didn't have anything interesting to say.

Because it's cheaper than paying people.

I've definitely noticed it on meat that has gone off, and previously was not iridescent. I wonder if bacteria create surface gratings.

What difference does it make if I meet him? Our lives and access to resources are still impacted by mega wealthy people.

I pay taxes that build roads and schools which enable commercial tycoons like Bill Gates to reap enormous profits. Bill Gates buys farm land, which drives up prices and blocks me from accessing that land.

That looks really close to be a useful farm hand. $16k for a device that can dig a trench, spread mulch, pick weeds, and harvest stuff off the ground would be pretty awesome.

It's cool as an academic exercise, but there are things in life where the struggle is kind of the point. The messy learning process, asking other humans for help, is better for your growth.

Penalize tech companies for damaging children and put the money towards rehabilitation.

And 3 days after another HN submission on a self-powered sensor that harvest energy from soil microbes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39046697

I think managers in tech companies are very often just really untalented as leaders. Good leaders create more leaders. Growing talent and getting the best out of people should be the goal for any leader, and I've seen so little of that from the ones I worked with.

After a point it just becomes part of the landscape, a pervasive culture of not recognizing what good leadership looks like, and people filtering out of the industry because they're over it.

That is not correct. AI safety is a subject on which serious books have been written, serious scientists have published research, and serious organizations have spent tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars on researching it. Who are you who to say "advocated don't know anything about AI safety"?

Well, humans aren't machines. Why would a definition of AGI need to apply to humans? On the other hand, as we gain the ability to edit our DNA, I think recursive self-improvement over generations is on the table for our species.

I guess it would be useful to have a definition of weak AGI, but after reading Bostrom's Superintelligence, I struggle to imagine an AGI without a singularity or intelligence explosion. It seems like wishful thinking.

Recursive self-improvement.

I wonder why the Navy or Core of Engineers can't make civilian nuclear systems. It arguably would have made us safer as a country to have energy independence by investing dollars in reactors for domestic use instead of for warheads and nuclear submarines.

> Google...peaked at 398 million requests per second...surpassing the 2022 record of 46 million requests per second.

The crocodile looks like the lowest effort one, but I could see a bird landing on that.

As we get older it's harder to remember what it felt like to be a kid and how we perceived feedback from adults. I appreciate this kind of science that reminds us of things that might be obvious to young people.

The goal of praise should be to congratulate, not manipulate behavior. The aim is to encourage an internal drive.