Kevin_P
1yr ago
I'm not going to tell you to move or not to move. If you have the money there's nothing wrong with spending it on something that will improve your quality of life.
But this:
I wonder if by moving to the pricier place, the higher rent will light a bit of a fire under my butt and result in faster progress in my work that ends up paying more dividends on a net basis. That might even be true after the first 15-months when rent will basically double.
... is wishful nonsense, as you seem to have already figured out based on your following paragraph.
You can use the same logic to justify any sort of spending, not just housing. And other things too - eating that extra dessert is actually good for my diet, because gaining weight will make me more focused on exercise tomorrow.
Ironically the motivation trick will probably work better in the opposite direction. Tell yourself, "if I put in the extra effort over the next 12 months, I'll treat myself to a nicer apartment this time next year". That way you're linking the effort to the reward in a much more direct way.
Like I said at the beginning, this doesn't mean you shouldn't move. If the nice apartment is worth the extra cost then go for it, you don't seem to be hurting for cash. But don't justify it based on second-order effects that will probably never happen.
Also you can simplify the two short-term financial effects you mentioned. A $x discount per month for 15 months plus a $1500 one-time cost is pretty much the same thing as a discount of $(x-100).
Kevin_P
1yr ago
I've read several times here that the climate forecast often described by news articles as "business as usual" (RCP8.5) is based on outdated assumptions and that actual emissions are already well below that forecast.
The explanations seem reasonable, but when I've tried to look for data to confirm / quantify it I havent had any luck.
Does anyone have a good source with numbers for forecast emissions from RCP8.5 (and possibly other forecast models) directly compared against actual emissions since the forecast was made?
Kevin_P
1yr ago
Mostly money. From the administrators' point of view it's all about the tuition fees. And not just for the masters students, in some humanities programmes even the PhD students have to pay.
From the professors' point of view, postgraduates help support their supervisors' research, plus they're much more interesting to work with than undergrads.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
Specifically Frontier (Elite 2) and Frontier: First Encounters (effectively an expansion to Frontier but sold as a separate game to try and wriggle out of a contract). The original Elite didn't have Newtonian flight.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
The Oxford English Dictionary is usually a good place to look. The full version has sourced examples for early usages of all different senses of a word.
Unfortunately it's a paid service but someone here might have access, most likely through a university.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
They've changed core aspects before. THAC0 was probably the defining element of pre-third-edition D&D.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
My favorite illustration of this is something called Centaur Chess.
Early chess engines would occasionally make dumb moves that were obvious to human players. Even when their overall level improved enough to beat the top human players they still often did things that skilled players could see were sub-optimal.
This meant that in the late 90s / early 00s the best "players" were human-computer teams. A chess engine would suggest moves, then a human grandmaster would make their move based on that - either playing the way the computer suggested, or substituting their own move if they saw something the computer had missed.
But as AI continued to develop the engine's suggestions kept getting better. Eventually they reached a point where any "corrections" were more likely to be the human misunderstanding what the computer was trying to do rather than a genuine mistake. Human plus computer became weaker than the computer alone, and the best tactic was to just directly play the AI's moves and resist the temptation to make improvements.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
"Only have access to the good stuff" is probably best accomplished by limiting access to GPUs at all.
This is already happening. The US government has already banned Nvidia from selling high-end chipsets to customers in China. One important point about the bans is that this not only bans the current top-end chips but also anything they develop in the future with similar capabilities - so in a few years it will cover high-end gaming cards too, and gradually extend lower down the range as time goes on.
That's currently in the geopolitics sphere, but it's easy to see it being rolled out to other customers that the people in charge don't want to have unfiltered access to modern AI tools. If the masses want powerful GPUs they can use an online service like GeForce Now or Dall-E that restricts any sort of dangerous/undesirable behavior.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
Sorry for snapping at you but that was one of the examples I was thinking about when I wrote the post. It makes a lot of assertions but is very short on actual numbers. There's a chart but it's on a 100 year scale and far too zoomed out to read off the emissions numbers for any given year. And maybe I'm just not reading the references properly but I looked up a few of them and couldn't find anything in there that directly says how many gigatonnes of CO2 were emitted vs how many were forecast by RCP8.5.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
Limiting to things that I've known people to forget or not think of:
-
Chargers (this is the #1 forgotten item among people I know)
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Plug adapters, if traveling somewhere with a different electrical system
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Mouse (you CAN work on the trackpad for two weeks, but it's much less comfortable)
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Work shoes, if traveling in comfortable shoes (somehow shoes are much easier to forget than shirts or trousers)
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Download or print out your tickets and hotel reservations
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Spare phone, if traveling somewhere where roaming is expensive (it's often much cheaper to buy a local sim card rather than paying roaming fees for data)
Obviously also ID, bank cards, phone, laptop, clothes etc as others have said - but those are obvious enough that you're not realistically going to forget them.
I got 30,246 and also got avulse wrong. Maybe there are a handful of points for speed?
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