somenameforme

81% of households have a desktop/laptop. [1] And the breakdown is basically a proxy for wealth. Only 56% of households with earnings of less $25,000 have a desktop/laptop whereas it's 96% for $150k+.

[1] - https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/computer...

He's referring to the magnitude of the drop. Stocks don't generally drop 50% after an earnings miss. Rapid swongs of 50% are like a penny stock, or a meme stock.

I submit exhibit 1: the US monetary supply. [1] We're 'printing' money like there's no tomorrow. Up ~6% in a single year, well over a trillion dollars. That's obviously going to make an economy look increasingly nonsensical.

I increasingly get the same feeling I did as back in the early 2000s when there were endless 'house flipping' shows on TV where somebody would go buy a house on an insta-improved loan, add some granite counter tops and mop the floor, then resell it within a couple of weeks for $20k profit and repeat. Not sure how people didn't see that was basically 'Bubble - The TV Show!'

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

Yeah Jean is pronounced more like 'Jawn' but I just mean it's a clearly male name in either case, as opposed to Jean pronounced 'Gene' which is generally a female name, though oddly 'Gene' also pronounced the same is generally a male name.

I think that's an example of what he's talking about. Jean-Luc is pronounced "John Luke" whereas the feminine form is Gene. And similarly the male Jan is pronounced Yan.

? Jameson, Smithson, Thomson, Wilson, etc, etc.

For myself there'd be many but it's difficult to name them in isolation. For instance 'In the Pale Moonlight' is obviously going to be near to #1, but I think if you don't have the buildup and character arc to that point that it might not hit with the same sort of impact as somebody who'd watched the show to that point.

It's kind of like Game of Thrones and 'The Red Wedding'. That episode is zomg, but if you watched it in isolation with no knowledge of the character arcs to date, it'd probably be interesting, but wouldn't have anywhere near the same sort of punch.

I thought this as well, then found myself in the situation of not needing to work and found that, after some period of hedonism, it became quite empty. I think in the past it was easier for more people to experience this. We had less 'stuff' but much larger families and lived in generally more social systems. Those mitigate a lot of the coercive extrinsic pressures to work. And I think this is why philosophy, especially personal philosophy trending towards self betterment, was so much more prevalent in the past.

I think if one looks beneath the veneer there's far greater inequality than that. The typical human issues are regularly hit on in the show. I mentioned [1] one great example above in the episode Tapestry. But even more broadly than that consider lifestyle differences. Right now on Earth the lifestyle between a billionaire and an average person isn't all that different. They have nicer stuff and more influence, but we live lives that are still roughly the same. The endless hedonism people think they'd engage in if they had billions gets old fast.

But now imagine on the Star Trek universe the difference in lives between somebody in Starfleet and a regular 'peasant.' You have this class of people out there exploring the universe, making amazing discoveries, and pushing the boundaries of humanity in every way. And then you have the peasantry back on Earth doing Earthy things. The difference in these lives would be dramatically more stark than now a days, to the point that they may as well be two different species. Come to think of it, that could literally happen since Starfleet families would likely disproportionately beget Starfleet children and so on. And these differences in environment/family would create radically different classes.

In reality there would likely be major class protests, claims of nepotism, calls for Starfleet to be 'more inclusive', and so forth. In short order everything would start rapidly descending into disorder.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50332143

This reminds me of a nice quote about engineering: 'Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.' Another is that 'If people knew how many assumptions went into designing a bridge, they’d never dare cross one.'

Engineering isn't about creating some perfect thing that is prepared for any conceivable scenario, but about solving a problem as efficiently as possible.

I think the problem with modern Star Trek series is that they simply have terrible writing. DS9 produced some of the best TV ever with action/sci-fi blends, and it also did more dialogue driven scenarios phenomenally well. I think the thing that really drew people in to DS9/TNG is that the writers really seemed to understand people of all perspectives, and so were able to create highly compelling characters and stories.

For instance the various plot points in DS9 between Sisko and Eddington (like "For the Uniform") often have you starting to cheer for the 'bad guys', while really confusing the question of who the good guy and who the bad guy even is. DS9 even excels as 'humanizing' the Cardassians who are, on the surface at least, just an evil trope. And recent times in real life should emphasize, to the point of absurdity, that this is what people and situations are genuinely like.

But the modern Star Treks feel like they were written by people living in a bubble with minimal life experience. They rely on political tropes and diametrically opposed good/evil stuff that's utterly banal, and intellectually insulting. They actually do have some of the same writers as previous shows though, so I assume there must be production/directorial pressures that caused the shift in 'style.'

One of my favorite episodes of TNG was Tapestry, to the point that it significantly influenced my life perspective. It emphasizes that even in this sort of idealized world, the things you might want to avoid are still unavoidable. [1]

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHoPLhpw2g4

Probably a controversial take - but in the pursuit of elegance. 'Uhh, so I need to hook this connector up to that receiver using this adapter and then uh, I pass it to the connector manager which sends it to the scheduler that... @#%! FML.' And then it's all so polymorphicized that going through the debugger you spend an eternity just trying to figure out what the types even mean and why/where they came from.

When you look at old-school code that just hacked things together, it was ugly, but also very easy to in turn further hack. There was no elegance or grand base types with 80 levels of inheritance to enable clean extension at every possible juncture of types. And no spending forever to find out the exact function you want to be able to override, only to discover that it's outside your modifiable codebase and wasn't marked virtual. Everything just worked.

More likely GMOs or at least GMO related. Thanks to the rise of GMOs glyphosate has left everything drenched in it, including non-GMO crops. Wheat/cereals are particularly relevant because it's often used right before harvest as a desiccant, or as a 'pre-harvest herbicide' in jurisdictions where using it as a desiccant is outlawed.

Glyphosate wrecks the gut biome, and it seems reasonable to expect that the consequences of such could be attributed as some sort of sensitivity to something which correlates with the highest sources of direct concentration; in this case - gluten.

I'd love to know the demographic breakdown there. For instance I know students in some relatively isolated corners of the world are still, ubiquitously, using it to cheat. And a quick search gives around 1.4 billion students globally.

Obviously it's not just students, but the fact it [numerically] could be is rather amusing and makes me surprised that it's only 1 billion active users, since GPT has a lock on name recognition amongst low information users.

I'd guess that driving was probably more broadly enjoyable for people in the era of manual transmission. That's not to say manual transmissions are fun, but the greater degree of interactivity, control, and skill made it a more interesting and overall enjoyable experience. Also it was kind of cathartic getting up to speed somehow. Driving an automatic is just boring, outside of like others have mentioned - the insane acceleration in an EV.

Manuals on a bridge during traffic though are... unpleasant.

I'm not going to debate the history beyond observing that most people were fleeing persecution or seeking a better life for themselves and their families. Scarcely few set out to conquer anything. But I think the most important point is that now a days I think if you put just about anybody in the current state of America, you'd see a trend towards desiring smaller government.

The exact phrase 'smaller government' is triggering because it's been so politicized into being a left vs right concept, but when left leaning individuals seek to decrease the strength of ICE, decrease the rights/capacity/scope of law enforcement, limiting executive powers especially as related to war, and other such things they are themselves also directly appealing for a smaller government, in at least some ways.

I think this hypothesis (that 'anybody' would trend towards seeking smaller government) is even testable with things like Asian Americans. Many/most have roots from more social type societies, and predictably trend towards voting liberal in America as a result of such, to say nothing of historical issues. But they are leaning more and more conservative over time, to the point that at current trends they will likely be a majority conservative bloc within a few decades.

It's simply that once one sees what 'big government' amounts to in the US and the current state of the US government, it quickly leads many people to start running in the opposite direction. And once you start running from such, the opposite (self responsibility/reliability/etc) inevitably grows in proportion simply because there is no other choice.

And you'll find that a number of states of a comparable makeup as Norway have comparable and even lower recidivism rates than Norway. Oregon is the lowest in the US, with a recidivism rate of 12%, contrasted against Norway's ~20%. [1] And that has nothing to do with punishment vs rehabilitation.

Similarly, Asia is another interesting counter-example to Norway. For instance the Chinese penal system makes the US look like a trip to Disney Land. Beatings, physical+psychological torture, and more are regular aspects of their prison system which is not only punitive but borderline sadistic. And their recidivism rate? One of the lowest in the world, around 8%. And perhaps even more important than the recidivism rate is their crime rate, which is also one of the lowest in the world.

[1] - https://usasymbol.com/rankings/crime/recidivism-rates-by-sta...

He also appeared as a guard (Sejanus) in I, Claudius - and was phenomenal. He also had hair at some point, believe it or not!

Did you know that you can be sentenced to life imprisonment in the UK for suggesting that the monarchy should be abolished? [1] That's quite progressive, since it used to be the death penalty. Now in reality you probably won't be, but that law is an echo, still ongoing, of the sort of systems everybody used to live under. That directly leads to ideals of a smaller government. So I don't think these sort of values we're speaking of are abstract or moralistic in nature.

It's also not just in the past. We continue to live in the era of mass domestic surveillance, Patriot Act, Snowden leaks, regular oppression for political views (see: pro-Gaza protests), two tier legal systems, and much more. All the while governments with vast resources plunge sizable chunks, verging on a majority of discretionary spending, into militarism flirting with WW3 and the viable end of humanity it would entail. And I'm not even going to get into the insanity that's going on, worldwide - including the West, with the treatment of political candidates and elections. Suffice to say that's also enough to make a lot of people quite concerned.

So again all of this makes one begin to think 'perhaps governments shouldn't have this much power or wealth' at a point that I imagine you would say is, itself, already relatively low. I think that should all be fairly reasonable, even if one might disagree at some point. But I'm not entirely sure what the comparable evidence for the alternative is.

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/dec/13/calling-abol...

This is absurd. I literally just looked up 'BTC wallet' on multiple search engines and all link to https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet . From there there's literally a wizard that clicks you through based on your knowledge/desires, and then links to exactly where to get a wallet that fits best with what you're after.

It has a lower population than e.g. Wisconsin, in an area about twice as large. You could fit 61 Norways (in terms of population) into the US. I think there's a lot of things that work really well at smaller scale, but just don't work at larger scale. It's not really possible to say where 'smaller scale' ends because it's going to depend on factors other than just population, but I think Norway is comfortably far into the very small side of things in part because of population and in part because of those other factors.

I think you're looking at an effect instead of a cause. The main reason for the desire for a small government is not some inherent and absolute obsession with smallness, but because of the belief that larger governments are incapable of effectively utilizing their power (for reasons beyond just incompetence), are prone to inevitable abuses, and so forth. And that belief itself is not simply ideological, but based on history through most of all time.

Even with rehab versus punishment - it's the same story. The view isn't that punishment is inherently superior, but simply that rehabilitation is more of an ideal than a reality, and that typical appeals to places like Norway - a relatively homogenous and extremely wealthy microstate - don't necessarily translate well to large diverse societies, especially ones where there are substantial chunks of society that adopt cultures that glorify criminality.

Some countries like Iceland let their banks fail (in no small part because their total debt was something like 10x their gdp), and they even successfully prosecuted a number of executives. They got moderate slaps on the wrist but did serve some token time in prison as opposed to having to pay a ground-breaking fine of 5 minutes of revenue as is more typical. It wrecked their economy in the short-term but they were back to growth by 2011, and had a larger than ever economy by 2015.

But I think more than the one-off situation is also the precedent it sets. When you can bank on the government bailing you out (pun intended I guess?), it creates a perverse incentive of just trying to get as large as you possibly can, all foundation or principles absolutely be damned - because once you get big enough you win, even if you're the biggest loser ever. And I do think that's what we're probably seeing with LLM companies.

Not that LLM's a loser - it's a revolutionary tech and will only become more so. But multi trillion dollar valuations for a product that has viable open competitors already available and whose operating requirements continue to plummet and will almost certainly continue to plummet? This is extremely amusing, but absolutely batshit insane. It's like paying millions for a pretty flower because it's novel in spite of the fact that you know, and everyone else knows, that once people start planting them there will be endless amounts available for negligible cost.

Calling/implying that it's technically sophisticated is not really reasonable. Having a BTC (or other currency) wallet is utterly trivial, let alone from a technical standpoint, it's much easier than setting up an e.g. Coinbase account. The only issue, outside of choice of course, is people being ignorant of what needs to be done and I think that can largely be explained by the fact that centralized providers spend billions on marketing while decentralized wallets spend nothing on it.

I think the point is having ambition but no purpose beyond the ambition itself. Money is the obvious example. Somebody wants to make lots of money. Okay, but why? The why there is what really matters, yet many never answer that. And so you end up in this sort of system where you have people chasing ever more zeroes on their bank account and not only doing nothing of much value with it, but actively causing chaos and destruction to achieve it. And why? There is no why - the money is the point in and of itself.

Like imagine shells were used as a currency in some isolated tribe and suddenly there were these people who'd just collect shells for endless hours each and every day, to go bury them in their hiding hole, only to wake up and do the exact same thing the next day, only occasionally trading some completely inconsequential part of their shell collection for food or whatever. We'd certainly pathologize it, yet that'd be far less neurotic than what we do in our society since shell collecting is harmless whereas many of the things we do in pursuit of shells are completely self destructive.

I think it's more that social standards of acceptability tend to continually degrade. There was a time when calling someone a scoundrel or a rascal was one of the most vile insults imaginable, potentially worth fighting to the death over, and I mean that completely literally.

I used the word 'degrade' earlier and I'm not sure fighting to the death over rascal is a higher state of enlightenment, but I do think words should have meaning, and now they mostly no longer do because everything is always hyperbolized to the most ridiculous degree.

So if the FBI was doing something akin in modern times they'd probably weaponize their knowledge by framing him as a viable rapist or other sort of sexual predator as opposed to a simple womanizer.

Yip, LLMs were the executioners but SO had already long since put itself on death row for exactly what you're mentioning. I think sites like FlipCode were in many ways the spiritual predecessor of SO, and the questions were more of a part of the community rather than the definition of it. People need to feel free to communicate for something like SO to be successful, and they'd turned themselves into an absurdly user-hostile site where it seemed like people were competing against each other to see who could find a reason to close questions, rather than looking for a reason to answer them.

The irony is they were constantly looking for reasons to mark a question as low quality, but the moderation efforts were themselves extremely low quality, like absurdly so. Things would be marked as dupes when they had no relationship whatsoever, completely inappropriate questions would be asked antagonistically like 'provide a minimal replicable code example' for an abstract/theoretic question, and stuff that stood a chance of fostering a healthy discussion was just randomly closed.

It's perhaps a good example of the dangers of using volunteer moderators. It just never works out, because doing a good job of moderating is a thankless, time consuming, and painful job. So you disproportionately end up with people doing it for power over others or some perception of status seeking. In either case, these are the last sort of people you want having any authority whatsoever over others.

I mean that the economics are similar to software. All of the complexities you mention are about initially creating a drug, replicating that drug once that's wrapped up with is, relatively, very cheap and simple. This is in comparison to 'normal' industries where there's often a huge cost and complexity involved, even once a product has been completely finalized.

This is even more true when "progress" means fertility rates collapse. A culture that is not self sustaining will die, and far more quickly than most realize. It doesn't matter how awesome that culture is for a brief moment in time, it will cease to exist.

Amish have an overall fertility rate around 6, which is why there are now almost half a million Amish in America alone. They had less than half that in 2000. In a few decades, they'll number in the millions. If people don't start having babies then groups like the Amish will take over the world, very much turning "the meek shall inherit the Earth" into a completely fulfilled prophecy. In some ways it's perhaps even a self fulfilling one if it turns out that 'non-meek' behaviors result in unsustainable societies.