sixo

It's just a terrible point. You couldn't make a weaker case against data centers if you tried.

sort of. It does a lot less than Roam, etc., which is good because Roam is complicated. In my experience the simple model of obsidian is just right, and the implementation is excellent.

Some pertinent fragments of wisdom gleaned from other places:

Somewhere I encountered a quote like "the finest art is a life well-lived". This threw me, because, apparently, I had been thinking of art as something different in kind from life, and unrelated to the normal work or act of living. Seen in terms of this quote, art becomes once again of-a-kind with life, and may be seen as only a part of living well, instrumental to living well, or perhaps just as practice for living well.

Something similar seems to be happening with "thinking" and "intelligence". Somehow these things had become ends-in-themselves, separate from the regular act of living. We might wrap them in a similar quote to place them in relation to life, along the lines of "thinking well is for living well", or perhaps "the highest good of the intellect is to be well-fit to the problems of living well".

I am reminded also of a line which stuck with me from Augustine's Confessions, approximately: "The mind is not the supreme good"—as opposed to the body and perhaps the "spirit". Somehow the world I was born into had collectively come to think of the mind as the supreme good, and intelligence as the greatest virtue. But this is, in some way, in contradiction the basic fact of existence and mortality: no amount of cleverness can circumvent death, and all the glory attainable by feats of the intellect are only futile vanities compared to the privilege of being alive itself.

That kind of thing.

Nobody has a moat so long as employees can move between companies

This really is a place where the guns-don't-kill-people argument applies, even moreso than guns themselves. The U.S. government massacred school children in Iran. Why does it matter how they targetted them?

It is in the interest of everybody-except-OpenAI and Anthropic that those companies have capable competitors; better still for the competitors to share their advances.

They don't have to be our friends to act in our interest.

They just need to be educated not to touch the wires. As it happens they figured it out pretty quick

I imagine this is the referee's call; a ref ought to know better than to abort the game because the losing team is throwing a tactical tantrum.

I think this is definitely part of the problem. The senses are designed to all be involved in navigating a single, mostly-permanent world. Proprioception is supposed to orient within this permanent space. Whereas my proprioception has "nothing to do" in video games, and all my senses are only experiencing the world outside the game, which I am giving none of my attention.

Subjectively, it gets much worse when I play a lot of of video games, and I am rapidly losing the ability to develop facility at new games. Of course this could just be said to be aging, or some other malady of the mind, but it feels distinctly related to the gaming in particular.

I have a feeling gaming is quite harmful for spatial skills in the long run, because you learn many different maps (often transient ones in rng-ed games), rather than one fixed one. I would not be surprised if an epidemic of early mental decline begins to show in gamers in coming decades. I'm 36 now and feel like my spatial reasoning is declining in a strange severe way.

Psychological state is key, and I think you're understating it.

The human mind is always passively working on problems. We are not necessarily aware of how much working memory is "tied up" on background computations, but when it's a lot, we will feel a natural aversion to new learning, it will be exhausting, and we will lack for curiosity. This is fine, working as intended.

When in this state, what one usually needs to do is a different part of the learning process: not absorbing new information or abstractions, but making sense of what one already knows, working out contradictions, assembling larger-scale theories--synthesis, basically. "Learning" is only one part of the arc of "thinking".

Usually this is best done by writing, and usually comes easiest when trying to convince someone else or what we believe. If you can't find the energy to learn, try writing instead.

That's a nice argument, though it doesn't hold relativistically

Kinetic energy is, strangely, quite a bit like a least squares cost function in an optimization problem. The "dt"s in "dx/dt" hardly matter; it basically represents "dx^2" between the current state and the next.

I read this kind of essay as a certain part of the arc by which new thoughts are formed: an act of large-scale pattern matching, laying out a bunch of cases which resemble each other, searching for the essential basis of the resemblance.

To post such a pattern allows the thought process to become distributed. Perhaps someone else will see the insight.

things which help other people make money are overvalued relative tothings which are valued intrisically

I suspect that, in reality, it is the indignity of poverty which motivates people to take up arms against each other. So long as dignity is retained, poverty may be emotionally bearable (perhaps to the point of actual starvation, when dignity becomes unsustainable).

To hold this view you have to think of information as "not real", not like "real" molecules and receptors, the mind as distinct from the body, and then restrict the legal definition of harm to only "real" things.

This is an odd thing to do, because :

- information is real, it exists in the universe.

- the harm of social media is real, as measured by many of the same measures as the harm of smoking

Why not do something about ads? No, that's a good thought, we should do that too.

I think a decent conceptualization here is "psychic damage", as in a video game. These things deal a lot of it.

This ought to change your mind about Ruby!

Feels fairly likely, though I'm skeptical the Jeeves name recognition is much besides a novelty now.

Missed opportunity to name an LLM "Jeeves" and finally live up to the vision.

The right read here is to realize that psychology alone is not the basis for moral concern towards other humans, and that human psychology is, to a great degree the product of the failure modes of our cognitive machinery, rather than being moral.

I find this line of thinking to lead to the conclusion that the moral status of humans derives from our bodies, and in particular from our bodies mirroring others' emotions and pains. Other people suffering is wrong because I empathically can feel it too.

We as a society accept the insurance system as an implementation of "funding healthcare" because market capitalism is supposed to lead to lower prices, fair allocation of scarce resources, and innovation, among other things. That is, the insurance industry is a market solution to a moral problem.

If insurance companies then can wiggle out of covering pre-existing conditions, they're no longer solving the moral problem they were brought into the world to solve, and now we need some other solution to solve the rest of it. Then, whatever that other solution is, it's solving the hard part, so why not extend it to solve the whole thing and cut the insurance middlemen out of the economy entirely? What are they even doing at that point besides extracting a rent?

(This is one answer among many good ones to what is really a bad-faith question—health-insurance is not a lot like fire-insurance at all)

HN people always try to do this cute rhetorical gesture where you take a thing and say "hmm nice idea what if we called it <thing that already exists>", but they like this joke so much they get baited into doing it in dumb ways like this one.

A coworking space in every building != a WeWork. There's a big difference between these! You could implement the former by opening a million WeWorks but that doesn't sound good at all; residential apartment buildings already have common areas, free to residents, they would simply have to be reimagined slightly.

I don't see how that's necessary at all. All the arguments that WFH might be a good idea in the first place would still hold.

I would love to have a coworking-space-on-every-block (or in every building) where all the WFHers can go to be around other people (just not the coworkers)

A reputation moat is still a moat. It seems to me that Lego prices will drop as soon as they are forced to by competition, and not before, and this is fine.

Prices are constrained by demand moreso than by cost of production. Lego pieces are expensive because they can be, they still sell, and this is largely due to the quality. As long as the quality moat persists, they can charge as much as people will pay, and--good for them!

That you personally would prefer lower prices does not mean they "should" be lower. Those lower costs of production, to Lego company, "should" mean higher profits, not lower prices, and again--good for them!

It appears that the real lesson here was to lean quite a bit more on theory than a programmer's usual roll-your-own heuristic would suggest.

A fantastic amount of collective human thought has been dedicated to function approximations in the last century; Taylor methods are over 200 years old and unlikely to come close to state-of-the-art.

There's also a trip to Hawaii in it for you.