bart_spoon

No statistical methods do, Bayesian or frequentist. That’s the definition of a black swan, it’s something completely out of the data set and therefore can’t be forecasted.

What might that look like in this situation? A user goes to play Spotify and it responds with “No” and shuts itself down? I generally agree with you that endless content consumption is a bad thing, but I also can’t envision a system where this is possible. It requires enough friction for the user to decide against continuing, which either comes in the form of a service providing less appealing content, making content more costly to consume, such as literally paying per song played, or services simply refusing to serve more content after a certain point. All of which are complete non-starters.

Their job is to manage their teams and initiatives. If they are unable to determine why an initiative fails or how their teams are performing, it means they are incapable of doing their job.

That doesn’t seem like a sustainable alternative. In the case you are describing, the productivity boost is highly dependent on actually having the right people within ear reach. You are relying on the right people happening to hear other conversations. What if your team is large, so that even if you are all in office, the chances of stumbling into the right conversation is lower? What if you are grabbing lunch, or in the bathroom, or meeting with someone else when that conversation is happening?

The most effective solution in my experience has been when working remote, and having a culture where a team has open discussions on their own Slack channel, with threads for particular conversations. That way, everyone can contribute to the conversation, it’s asynchronous so you don’t have to be in exactly the right place and right time to participate, and people can go back and review details very easily if needed.

You are right that that doesn’t apply if the conversations are happening in private DMs, but that’s a matter of team culture. You have to be intentional in a remote setting, just the same as you do in an office setting. But if you are it can work very well in my experience, perhaps even better than in person.

If the AI is being judged as a winner, than by definition isn’t it superior to the typical human produced content, at least in this case? Seems like the opposite of enshittification.

Measure twice, cut once

They aren’t trying to become the best at something, they are trying to maximize the ROI of their time.

The more I’ve looked at DSPy, the less impressed I am. The design of the project is very confusing with non-sensical, convoluted abstractions. And for all the discussion surrounding it, I’ve yet to see someone actually using for something other than a toy example. I’m not sure I’ve even seen someone prove it can do what it claims to in terms of prompt optimization.

It reminds me very much of Langchain in that it feels like a rushed, unnecessary set of abstractions that add more friction than actual benefit, and ultimately boils down to an attempt to stake a claim as a major framework in the still very young stages of LLMs, as opposed to solving an actual problem.

And yet just today I read an article about how more than half of tech CEOs now are allowing workers to work fully remote if the choose, which is up from closer to 35% a year ago. It’s possible some of the RTO push was to get people to leave, or that management, underestimated how unpopular it would be with employees, or perhaps the simplest explanation: management is mostly a cargo cult just throwing spaghetti at the wall, with no real rhyme or reason behind their decision making.

The public sentiment in those cities regarding immigration has completely flipped from the moment the buses started arriving. They were loudly in favor of refusing to enforce immigration laws when El Paso, Texas was dealing with hundreds of thousands of illegal border crossings over decades, but the second a few thousand start showing up in buses in Chicago and New York City, they declare a state of emergency and start demanding the stop of the immigrants being transported to their cities because they have no room. And now it’s probably the single strongest issue the Republicans are going to win on in the election.

I’m not conservative, but sending illegal migrants directly to sanctuary cities might be the single most effective strategic political move in my lifetime. It flipped a decades old stalemate on its head practically overnight.

If they opposed skilled immigration, there wouldn’t be a lottery at all, there would be 0 visas allocated.

It’s shocking to me that the argument that consistently gets trotted out as to why we should accept illegal immigration is that they perform jobs too dangerous and poorly paid for non-illegal immigrants to do. Perhaps if there wasn’t a never ending stream of people so poor and powerless to take advantage of, these industries might be forced to pay livable wages or provide better protections.

It’s insane that the supposedly progressive faction of American politics is arguing in favor of a system that amounts to a modern version of indentured servitude and systemic violation of labor rights, all for the sake of cheaper fruit and meat.

There is an important distinction between anti-immigration policies and anti-illegal immigration policies. I don’t know of many politicians who are against immigration of any kind. But there are plenty who are for doing something about the hundreds of thousands crossing the border illegally and/or abusing the asylum process. This isn’t even a partisan issue. Many of those opposed to fixing this problem did an immediate 180 the moment those illegal immigrants began being bussed to their city.

More than just Nashville, they have hospitals all over the country.

Can you think of a single location on Earth where the land was originally claimed in a free market?

No, the foreman like character in Hardspace has a heavy Southern accent and the soundtrack has a western tone

I think that pittance of calories is only the surface benefit. Consistent activity keeps your metabolism much higher, meaning you burn more calories throughout the day even when you aren’t moving.

Japanese people fry all kinds of food. They have plenty of soda as well, and there are plenty of Americans who struggle with obesity despite not drinking much soda.

It 100% has to do with walking/biking and portion sizes. Low intensity exercise throughout the day is as if not more effective than high intensity exercise for burning calories and keeping your metabolism from crashing.

Yes, I lived in Japan for a few years and those are the exact same two conclusions I came to, with the only additional one being much less added sugar/high fructose corn syrup. Food is generally much less sweet there.

I think I got into reading the most when I hit about 3rd or 4th grade. I think 8-9 years is when the reading possibilities really open up for kids. Its around that time I and many of my friends got into Redwall and Animorphs, and within a few years Harry Potter and books like the Black Cauldron.

Agreed. In video games, "innovation" quickly becomes "niche". Microsoft actually has a wider variety of games and genres represented on the Xbox, many highly praised, but frequently gets lambasted for having no games because the the overwhelming majority of players aren't actually interested in them. Sony on the other hand is dominating, and yet its biggest titles are all somewhat similar to each other and none of them really do anything new or interesting, they simply have a lot of polish.

I've recently come to the same realization. I've always considered myself a more short-distance athlete, having been a sprinter and played more "burst" sports in high-school like football. My wife is a more long-distance runner. I've never understood why people like her were able to run for miles and miles without stopping. I could maybe keep up with her for the first mile, maybe 2, but then I was toast.

It's only recently when I learned about Zone 2 training that I came to understand that my training approach has always been backwards. I have always indexed my pace on what has always been a "respectable" mile time, on the assumption that if I run at that pace over and over, eventually I'll be able to go for longer at that pace. And that kind of is true, but not ever to the extent I can keep up with my wife.

Now, I am attempting to approach my running from a "time spent running > speed", and I'm finding that I indeed can run for 40+ minutes straight with no stopping, at a much lower pace than what I had been, and that it is much easier to make progress by running slowly for 40 minutes and gradually increase my pace over time than it is to run quickly for as long as I can and gradually increase the distance.

The purpose of the Light Phone is to detach oneself from the unnecessary, time-consuming features of smartphones. There are approaches to this that are simply apps, and they are popular, but there is a genuine benefit to the approach a Light Phone takes which uses separate hardware to completely wall the user off, which app implementations can't do. And the standard phone manufacturers won't make the Light Phone obsolete by incorporating that feature, because it directly contradicts their business models.

With the R1, the point is to have an LLM powered AI assistant. Absolutely nothing about the product is enhanced by doing it as a separate device rather than an application. The design is eye catching, but comes at the price of several hundred dollars and requires you to carry two devices around. The second Apple or Google implements this functionality on their phones, this thing is dead. And I guarantee you they are working on this as we speak, and it will be available within 1-2 years natively on iPhones/Android.

Fentanyl, human trafficking, and identity theft can all be quite lucrative as well. Externalities matter. A high revenue stream does not equate to high benefit to society.

Do 95% of the world's river-adjacent population live along those rivers? That's the question to be asking.

Yes

I agree with you, but it goes beyond just smartphones.

TV shows were linear, so unless you had an interest in every single show being aired, your viewing was naturally limited to specific times.

Video games didn’t use to have online capabilities, nor did they provide endless matchmaking with completely strangers across the world, so if you wanted to play with other people, you had to do it in person. And games didn’t have endless streams of new content being released.

What changed is that everything became built around endless streams of content. Smartphones are a key enabler of that, but even legacy media like TV and video games have evolved to become bottomless content pits. Social media feeds never end, video games always have another match, there are always more shows and movies to binge on demand.

Indiana literally just banned phones from schools state-wide this month.

State bans are already occurring. Indiana just banned phones from schools a week or two ago.

We spend enormous amounts of time and energy trying to pick up the pieces of the destruction being left in the wake by social media giants as they get absurdly rich. How about we instead simply make the giants liable for what gets posted on their platforms? Let the “move fast and break things” crowd that is so certain of their own genius spend their billions on figuring it out instead of on how to get you to click on another ad.

They will figure out a solution very quickly or they will simply cease to exist, and either way the problem will be solved.