simonsarris

Simon Armitage's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is exceptional, much better IMO than the Tolkien translation. So I'm very excited for this.

The audio performance of it by Bill Wallis is also a family favorite:

https://www.audible.com/pd/Sir-Gawain-and-the-Green-Knight-A...

Just following the law, you mean, in the countries he is visiting.

That seems wildly incorrect. In the US the bottom 50% are closer to ~3% of federal taxes.

The top 1% pay about 38%. The top 0.1% is simply not a lot of people and not helpful for thinking about how much you can juice them in absolute dollar amounts.

You are bending a word to mean things it has never in its entire history meant. There is absolutely nothing intrinsic about democracy that protects minorities.

There is nothing intrinsic to democracy that means you need to have a constitution. This should be obvious since many democratic states and organizations have no constitution! The UK has no formal constitution, neither does Israel. Canada also has no single constitution document. There are probably lots of non-democracies out there that have constitutions. It's completely orthogonal to whether or not a place is a democracy.

Medium and long term I expect this to become the default enterprise choice, simply because Google will avoid faux pas, scandals, or reputational hazards of competitors (like Meta). I could be wrong of course, but like Apple signing up for Gemini I think its how how most biggish deals will go.

they don't require 30 years saved up, only showing (somehow) that you will be able to generate such a pension equivalent over time. I suspect that will be very squishy in practice.

The more welfare you have, the better of an idea this is. An aging country especially cannot afford to risk more wards of the state.

> and have enough money banked to live off of for 30 years

It's a confusing guideline but this isn't accurate. You need to show an expected future pension (could be savings) equivalent to a salaried worker who paid into an employee's pension for 30 years. That's strict, but there will probably be a bunch of ways to show that.

That does not, in itself, suggest they are a supply chain risk. It might label them a national security risk. And you might have your own creative definitions of every word related to supply chains. But we are talking about supply chain risks as the US Gov understands them.

These are just very different things. OAI "hacking" anything isn't OAI telling the US Gov what they can and cannot do with their product. Maybe along all kinds of axes, one is more alarming than the other, but it's a canard in this topic.

I think you're playing dumb on purpose here but in general yes, you are missing out on all the friends and connections and interesting conversations you have not made. I don't know what those are for you, but they're transparently obvious for me in the counterfactual, and a lot of people on the site.

> The wording is confusing but the account in question is the Antigravity account. We will change the ToS wording here to make that clearer.

- Varun Mohan on the antigravity team

https://x.com/_mohansolo/status/2095529407033000260

You can't imagine a more useful Roomba?

I think for safety reasons, we won't want any home robots to be very strong. Just precise.

more likely 4 pro will be released pretty soon instead, since pre-training for 4 began in late July

https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2079594867161022817

it is most likely that 4 pro will be released pretty soon instead, since pre-training for 4 began in late July.

https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2079594867161022817

> However, it is a precedent for governments deciding the names of things.

??? that's not true at all

> reminds me a lot of political/nationalist renaming of things like roads which is very common in parts of South Asia

Isn't that very common in... Canada?

    Ottawa, Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway -> Kichi Zībī Mīkan (2023)
    Winnipeg, Bishop Grandin Boulevard -> Abinojii Mikanah (2023–24)
    Halifax, Cornwallis Street -> Nora Bernard Street (2023)
    Montreal, Rue Amherst -> Rue Atateken (2019)
    Vancouver, Trutch Street -> šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmasəm Street (2025)
    Victoria, Trutch Street -> Su'it Street (2022)
    Calgary, Langevin Bridge -> Reconciliation Bridge (2017)

It's not like the current US admin is the first in North America to decide to rename things for political reasons.

Yes, this seems to happen a lot in small companies. It seems less inevitable in big ones but it still happens. You would think at a minimum AA would want to hire a journalist or similar simply to shadow him for a year, get him to dictate everything (so that he has to do as little extra effort as possible), and publish a sort-of manual from the accumulated wisdom.

The point of hiring someone specifically to do this is that he might simply want to keep on working, uninterrupted by apprentices or other demands, so the recorder must be a second person dedicated to knowledge maintenance.

I've been active here since 2009 and it started to get worse around 2016, and much worse in the last 2 years. Before 2016, any flippant, pointlessly cynical comment would be downvoted to oblivion. There were almost none that didn't get dead'd quickly. Now on political topics, those are the top half of comments.

There were always negative objection comments (like the famous dropbox one), but those are different. Many of these new cynical comments are not objecting, they're concurring with a poisonous cynicism.

I remember making this topic in late 2016 regarding it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13016237

Your first line is just as true of every single internet comment you have ever read, including your own.

> I propose a sane rule

You know this is untenable. You would be unable to use search engines for over a decade, or walk into a Target, or a gas station, or almost any public square if you truly believed this. You don't believe it. You're being hopelessly histrionic and that's not productive for anyone.

That's a feedlot for finishing. Throughout its life, a cow will spend 70-80% of its life in pasture. Feedlots are only efficient for the finishing of the cow.

I make this point and several more here, with some emissions figures: https://map.simonsarris.com/p/veganism-and-moral-intuitions

The ecology of it, including emissions, isn't really that bad if you're American. We're very efficient at beef production. It's really the global south that's most of the novel emissions, and that's mostly from counting land-use changes.

That is not how we keep cattle in the United States. In the US about 82% of grazing land is rangeland, which continues to support the natural ecosystems (prairies, shrublands, steppes, etc).

In places like Ireland, where cows have existed for 6000 years, they're also part of the ecology by any meaningful metric. There are a lot of more recently arrived species considered native! Mice, hedgehogs, rabbits, and red deer all came later.

also note that `class="text-red-500 text-green-500"` gets flagged immediately by the Tailwind VS Code plugin

> 'text-green-500' applies the same CSS properties as 'text-red-500'. tailwindcss(cssConflict)

So even if you do it by accident, it will tell you.

Yeah backlash against railroads was very widespread, from lots of angles (farmers, property owners, canal investors, health-conscious people, religious leaders, etc). Probably the same for cars.

I think you are missing the point of talking about utility in the first place. I have no interest in lamentations. If you told someone to stay away from social networks because of their flaws, you would be doing them a cultural and professional disservice.

As a more moderate metaphor it's like someone saying they like living in one city, for all its flaws, and someone else comes along and extolls the virtues of several imaginary cities. It's fun to imagine those places, but its silly to mention them when someone is speaking of utility. This rush to examples not beholden to reality seems more common among technical types than any other, and likely prevents you from benefitting from what exists today.

> but because "everyone is there." That ubiquity is the only "genuine utilty" they are offering you.

Sure. So what? You nonetheless cannot deny the utility. The friends that I have made from social networks are no less real. I am very grateful they (the means to discover these people now in my life) exist.

I just have website.com and my Substack is subdomain.website.com. If I ever wanted to move off (I definitely don't!) I could keep all the urls exactly the same with self-hosting.

But substack solved distribution (and community, and bookkeeping, un-distribution etc) and it solved getting paid for my writing, which is not enough to live on but its definitely significant and well appreciated. It is worth much more than its fees, because the counterfactual is that I don't have any of those things. I think it's a huge mistake to lump those together as "convenience", its a lot more than convenient!

The only important thing to me about having a non-substack website is that its good to have a place for more permanent information, lists, contact, etc. But even for many writers, that kind of stuff becomes stale so quickly that the personal sites don't tend to matter much, or even make them look worse! The floating social network spaces are much more valuable. Even losing my x.com would be much worse to my day-to-day life than losing my domain, though I may wish it were otherwise. And I cannot replicate that elsewhere. The social networks are big because they have genuine utility.

> even if, from first principles this is a non-starter in a democratic society.

This is a strange phrase - initially you had to either own land (therefore pay tax) or else if you lived in a city and didn't own land but paid sufficient tax[1], to vote in the early United States. Only taxpayers voting was our first principles! We only changed it later.

[1] I'm simplifying slightly because different states handled this differently