pbmonster
5hr ago
I asked Grok about the details of hypothermia and found it was a somewhat less urgent situation than I imagined. The man likely had been outside for 1-2 hours and likely would have been dead in about 3 more. Grok gives a big range of 2-12 hours for death by exposure in similar situations
Grok thinks the man will make a full recovery. Probably today, he will be released from the hospital.
Grok is a narrow-sighted idiot. Hours in single digit temperature weather and wind means frostbite. Even superficial frostbite (skin frozen solid) will blister, require pain management and permanent wound dressing. Walking on superficially frostbitten toes is excruciating, and for a reason - it should be avoided unless for survival.
His fingers had a grey hue to them and seemed frozen stiff.
Likely deep frostbite. Dead tissue may take weeks to declare itself. If that's the case, he's facing certain permanent damage to his hands and possibly amputations.
Let's hope he had his hands under his clothes for some of the time outside, and that he had proper boots.
Something truly weird. There is some strategic resource in Greenland. And America wants it. Information is being kept classified in the hopes no one fights too hard for Greenland. Maybe alien base.
Maybe the USG has proprietary information on natural resources? Public knowledge is that 25 of the EU’s 34 “critical raw materials” have been found in Greenland. Maybe that's already enough? Maybe someone found some more deposits closer to the coast, under thinner ice?
The know deposits are extremely expensive to develop and mine, especially if you care as much about the ecosystem and indigenous opposition as most EU states do, but that might change. Maybe making sure the EU (and/or China) can't ever access those has long term benefits for the US?
pbmonster
6d ago
If it costs businesses money to be forced to hire Australians, and wins back some social cohesion, it's just such an easy policy to pursue in my mind.
Maybe I'm just so much more black-pilled than you are. If you're changing something and "it costs businesses money" that automatically means not only is this not an "easy policy", it's going to be an uphill battle. No matter where you are, one of the political parties will be "pro business", and this party will fight you. Because this is actually important. There's actual money on the line. "Social cohesion", "anti immigration vibes", "campaign promises", ect. are all pretty much irrelevant once the wrong people lose money.
And if the same change also, at the same time, disadvantages minorities and/or people struggling with paper work, elements from the other side of the isle will also fight you.
they fail. So far the only thing that comes to my mind is civilian aerospace. They are way behind, rely on western parts, doesn't seem to be able to be waned off them and everything is way behind schedule. And that in a moment in which the lead times for delivery of aircraft approach 10 years. The market is hungry, China wants to provide, but they can't.
Brian Potter wrote up his findings about the "China cycle" in commercial aviation here. I found his arguments convincing.
He argues the core issue is that going after Boing and Airbus is simply extremely difficult, especially if you want to go after Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce and GE at the same time: "One is simply the sheer difficulty of building a modern commercial aircraft, which is probably one of the five or six most complex technical achievements of modern civilization (along with jet engines, leading-edge semiconductor fabrication, and nuclear submarines)." There's many subtleties (Boing and Airbus don't do manufacturing and tech transfer deals with China, Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce and GE don't do that either and also don't sell SOTA jet engines to China, US/EU air travel regulators are not favorable to Chinese hardware, ect.)
pbmonster
6d ago
This is honestly the most baffling part of the american immigration system to me.
In Australia, we have a requirement for all workplaces to verify that a new hire has a right to work in the country. You provide your birth certificate or working visa, or other proof upon your first day at work while you're signing a document with your preferred bank account for your salary. This costs the employee and the business approximately zero overhead.
But it costs those Australian businesses collectively billions of dollars in (direct and indirect) labor costs. Hiring illegals would be significantly cheaper, after all. Which is why the Americans don't do work permit checks. Every push for legislation like that would be met with intense lobbying from employers in the stereotypical sectors (farming, construction, hotels, ect.).
But it certainly also helps that a faction of the blue tribe is also opposed to work permit checks, for different reasons.
pbmonster
11d ago
In fact, growing tasty tomatoes is not a huge task.
What is unfortunately a huge task is growing tasty tomatoes, while - at the same time - making them fully machine-harvestable and giving them long shelf life while being tossed around in boxes and by customers in the produce section. Which is the actual reason large parts of Italy had access to excellent tomatoes - they still hand-picked a significant fraction of their tomatoes.
Notice the past-tense used above. Supermarket tomatoes in Italy today taste like anywhere else. From my informal data gathering, I'd guess they mostly faded out hand-picked heirloom varieties around 2010. Same is true for a lot of other "soft" produce, too. Peaches, plums, ect. now taste like everywhere else.
Farmers markets and restaurant suppliers still have the good stuff, though. The Italians additionally still grow a lot of heirloom varieties.
pbmonster
11d ago
How do you verify your conversations with LLMs? Are there services that ask several models in parallel and cross-validate their answers?
Which ones are you using primarily? With thinking and web search, they all now extensively cite their work, right? If a claim is missing a source, just ask for it to find one. And then, yes, I read the sources. If I don't like what I'm reading, I tell it to go find better sources.
If I'm far outside my expertise, I sometimes have two models debate each other by proxy. If one model claims X, I just tell it I've read Y somewhere and to explain where the discrepancy is coming from.
Does an IQ taboo (established for political reasons associated with another taboo around HBD, or any other reason) contribute to more of a reliance in many people on the heuristics of social class, physical features, clothes, sociolect and prosody, credentials/profession,
I'm having a hard time understanding what the alternative would be? Mean IQ during grades 1-4 tattooed to the forehead in childhood? And how does HBD play into that? Standard deviation on IQ is so large, you can never replace the other heuristics with it, on an individual level you absolutely shouldn't even include it into the list of heuristics in the first place.
In the end, you sometimes have to make an assessment about which strangers are worth listening to. Guessing IQ from hearing them speak (especially speak freely) works well in my experience. Even "correct"/"incorrect" vocabulary and sociolect cannot hide their true power level for long. And sure, the halo effect exists, but clothes, grooming and physical features were always the stereotypical weak point of hardcore nerds, so making assessments on those never worked all that well, especially in spaces like tech.
Yeah, that's the first major theme, and it always has some presence throughout the series. Next big one after that will be ableism, which also stays present till the end. Then classism, critique of empire and colonialism, mental health, fat acceptance, racism against actual new human sub-species, homosexuality, sexual deviancy, even some quick trans side characters.
But yes, most of it is well done.
The narration is so dense with jargon that there are often times when I literally cannot follow what's happening.
I think this has to be somewhat intentional, it forces you into the role of the narrator, who also doesn't understand what's happening. I'm only being half ironic. I found this to get better the longer you read. But yes, Blindsight is probably the book benefiting most from a re-read I can think of right now.
I'm likewise having trouble keeping track of which character is which, an especially galling failing given that the narration makes such a big point of how different the characters are
I know what you mean about the multiple personalities, that confused me to no end when it was introduced first. And I agree, three of them are extremely similar (I think their points of distinction are "mother", "child with romantic interest" and "child who uses curse words". But I was fine with that, if I remember correctly they mostly work different parts of the linguist job. The rest of the crew (vampire, STEM-autist, military woman and the narrator) are pretty distinct in my memory and reasonably well done voices. But that's not what Watts excels at anyway. I mostly love Blindsight for his unique ideas, the central premise, his world building, how he structured the story, and - yes - his prose. The last one is up to taste, and there can be no disputes about taste.
pbmonster
13d ago
It's one of my favorite first contact stories. What didn't you like so far?
pbmonster
13d ago
Good post. The internet really brought that efficiency everywhere. My example is ski mountaineering. The internet ruined it.
Even just 10-15 years ago, this was a niche hobby and an extreme sport. To plan a winter ascend, you had to buy guide books and stacks of paper terrain maps. The first few times you needed a good mentor or a hired mountain guide, just for judging the weather and the current avalanche risk (also for route finding and for teaching the techniques). But if you left the ski resorts behind, the mountains where empty and quiet, and full of untracked powder (that tried to kill you when you least expected it).
Then the internet told that every single resort skier on the planet, and it turns out they really already have 95% of the skills necessary to go touring. Now the back country is swarming with people. Mountains that used to be empty now have 10 different tracks leading to the summit the morning after a fresh snow fall. I can't even remember when I've had to break a fresh track the last time.
Decades worth of experience judging the weather? The daily forecast is much better than that, and it comes with live precipitation radar maps showing you where the snow storm is and where it's going to be, and when. The local guy tracking the layer composition of the snow pack all through the season? Professional avalanche reports online give everybody that information for every single valley. Route finding? Just load a GPX track someone else planned onto your smart watch. Want do check that guys work? Here's an app that shows slope angles and rates your track for avalanche risks. Local knowledge about a difficult couloir that has powder in late spring? It's all over Instagram, and there's 10 touring portal posts about its conditions this moth. Also, here's a 3D render of that entire mountain, in case you where wondering if there's any other skiable gullies.
There's upside, too, of course. All the information available actually is much better (especially if you buy guide books in addition anyway). It generally is so much safer now (but many more people die - because many more people are out there). The larger market hugely improved the gear - everything is lighter, more reliable, less finicky, more comfortable. The avalanche beacons now actually work.
I also have a counter example: the used market for commodity consumer products still works. All the kids here ride the same plastic bob sledge through the snow. It's a bomb proof design, tried and tested through the decades. They all get it from the same big box store, and it costs 140. Yes, for 4 pieces of injection molded plastic from China, made millions of times. Anyway, they go for 10 bucks on the local equivalent of Craigslist, and chances are the family selling theirs is about as far away as that big box store.
pbmonster
13d ago
I have fond memories going through the saga, it's certainly doing something pretty unique. Just introducing standard sci-fi tech gimmicks, and then really deep explorations of what having technology like that means for society. I also like how it mostly doesn't take easy outs, plenty of hard consequences for the characters to live with. It's pretty well done, even if it's much more classic space opera than modern hard sci-fi.
It's also an interesting time capsule, for me it's the absolute essence of proto-woke. The breath and depth of the progressive thought surprised me several times considering the release dates of the books. She hits most modern culture war foci decades before they became mainstream.
pbmonster
18d ago
you select down to an aristocracy-sized elite by a single high-stakes exam which is more heavily g-loaded than the modern American meritocratic grind
How do you prevent the preparation for this exam from turning into a decade long grind? Most exams like that (including the French ENA entrance exam and stuff like the International Math Olympiad) effectively are.
pbmonster
20d ago
Kebab slices stuffed inside a pita cut open on one side with sauces and a healthier mix of raw vegetables
The German-Ottomans cuisine collision shows signs of convergent evolution with Mexican cuisine. Most Döner Kebab places now sell more "Dürüm" than traditional pita-based Döners. And a Dürüm is basically just a Döner-Burrito.
Dürüms have better filling-to-bread ratios than Döners, are even easier to eat than their pita ancestors, and (probably an artifact of German Döner culture) are a bit larger than a Döner and thus closer in calories to a full meal.
In my book, it's a strict improvement on the concept of Kebab sandwiches.
Read Project Hail Mary, by Any Weir. Some mildly interesting "Science, Fuck Yeah" scenarios, but as a whole it's entirely overrated. Barely even literature.
I liked the Astrophage idea, and the implications of something like that existing. The science, the boost to technology, the effects on climate, the wars.
Still looking forward to the movie, but mostly because I enjoy looking at rockets lifting off. But Jesus, what made the studio people decide on putting the biggest spoiler imaginable right into the trailers? Worst example of a trailer I can think of. Catastrophically bad.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Amazon is a retailer - Amazon Essentials exist, but is <1% of my family's Amazon spend
Apparently it's one of the very few commodity products on there that actually has any margin. If this is true, I'll expect Amazon to eventually displace the competition, they are very experienced in the practice...
Then there's the publishing, their on demand book printing, the ebook business. And Amazon is highly vertically integrated even outside of those two, though. The data centers, the software in them, the warehouses, the trucks, ect. The market cannot offer them a competing product on any of those, although they are essentially commodities that other, similar business still get on the market.
Apple is similar. They use contractors on the low margin stuff and the things they absolutely cannot do themselves (SOTA chip fab), but keep the rest of the value add for themselves, and use the additional control that gets them to deliver a superior product directly to their own stores.
I don't understand Netflix either, but that might just be taste. Apparently their slop gets views - obligatory views at that, keeping their audience captive - and thus makes money. Make they are just lying about their metrics. But that would probably be fraud, I don't know. Maybe the average normie really forgets what he's subscribed to.
I know the idea is old, it's the only attack on efficient markets that makes sense. And there were vertically integrated business empires before, but never this many, this successful and seemingly this necessary to compete on product.
I think it's interesting that the last two decades have shown that you don't really need post-singularity AI. Because there has been a surprising explosion in vertical integration, all the most successful growth stories of the 21st century - both on the west and in China - don't really use market forces for their supply chains all that much. It's not quite a "cybernetic planned economy" just yet, but getting halfway there has looked pretty straight forward from the outside.
Tesla and Space X (both have more than 80% of the value creation inhouse) , Amazon (especially with the rise of Amazon Essentials), Apple, Netflix, BYD, Xiaomi, ect.
I think they all discovered that markets are very efficient, but only propagating price information is not enough for the next level of business/product execution. If you do the critical value ads inhouse, you can transmit so much addition information, resulting in significantly more control, you easily outcompete anybody just relying on competition eventually bringing prices down on commodities.
Also, this remarkable transition was mostly achieved with data networks, standard ERP software and hiring enough talent. I don't think anybody know yet how large you can make this vertically integrated blob (although Amazon and BYD are certainly trying) before you run afoul of the problems that brought down all other planned economies. If AI ever actually ends up with a reliable world model, it would certainly be extremely useful for this kind of planning, potentially pushing the size of the blob up another order of magnitude.
And sure, on actual commodity inputs and on final outputs, markets still rule supreme. Still, it's a surprising underperformance of markets vs planned economies in my book.
Great post!
It makes sense, in this scenario, to pursue a more aggressive version of the program that has been ongoing now for many decades. To manufacture employment. To have people do, perhaps ever more overtly, ever more ridiculously, what everyone knows is unnecessary.
If we're indeed getting to somewhere between "Semi Automated Luxury Earth Social Democracy" and "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism" (I'm not convinced - we've build an exceedingly complex civilization and AI can't save us), I think your central premise is correct: a job gives people purpose/structure/incentives. You want/need all of that for a more stable society.
The interesting question is if those jobs need to be so obviously unnecessary.
If you run a jobs program, why not do something good? Take small groups of children on a well-designed adventure. Teach them music, art or crafts. Coach them in a sport. Give them a lot of time one-on-one if you have so much capacity. Hell, take a group of adults through the same program - less formative, but it probably makes them happy/health/social if it's well-done (no excuse why it wouldn't be, you can pay people to do planning and quality control, then staple more incentives to the quality). And most of them don't have anything better to do anyway.
There's the argument that the post-WW2 combination of cheap housing and the expansion of the welfare state in Great Britain (together with the growth of new art schools and direct public funding for culture) resulted in a extraordinary wave of music, art, and cultural experimentation, completely over-proportional to the relative size of British society. And if you look at the artist at the fore-front, much of them came from working‑class or lower‑middle‑class backgrounds.
We could just do that again, so the people uninterested in adult day care can occupy themselves with something productive of their own inspiration. Most likely some of them will greatly contribute to the shared culture.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Fold on everything that isn't at least ${face card} + {ten or higher}.
Especially on smaller tables, I'd add at least the pocket pairs >7. And once you're down to 4 players or less, you can also start thinking about playing the lower pocket pairs and "suited garbage" (face card + 7-9).
pbmonster
1mo ago
Crazy, he tried that with checked luggage? I nodded my head along, because this is very low risk - as long as you only bring a carry-on and are willing to run with it.
Besides what everybody else has said already, I'd like to add that cold tolerance can be trained by exposure. If you currently go running/lifting, try going very lightly clothed (and move the activity outside, if your gym is heated). I find doing the exposure like this is much more comfortable than doing exposure while sedentary (which also works).
If you're highly motivated, you can add ice baths. Those get massively easier with exposure, too, and the adaption carries over to some degree. I recommend doing them in a rive, lake or the sea together with friends, that makes them at least type II fun...
If you don't want any more cold exposure in your life, I'd recommend keeping especially hands and feet warm. There's really nice lamb fur slippers and wool gloves for indoor use.
pbmonster
1mo ago
To most, a suburb is best understood as a quiet and safe residential neighborhood away from the downtown core. It has limited through traffic, has easy access to the city and prioritizes families.
I'd add another requirement: the suburb must still be dependent on the city for many, if not most, infrastructure and amenities. A suburb has some schools and maybe a grocery store - but not much more. Otherwise, its not a suburb but a small town.
This is also what make suburbs so distinctly American. For historical reasons, most settlements in the old world - and many on the east coast - have their single family residential neighborhoods around town centers that provide many services you would never see in a suburb out west.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Oh wow, you are correct! They also fly the E-3, because apparently Airbus historically didn't have any AWACS in their portfolio? Maybe the western market is so small that it doesn't support two manufacturers (the French have 2 E-2s and 4 E-3s)? That must have been humiliating for them.
This is really lazy, right? Trump could easily change the "reasonably genuine" wording and just have employers only submit real proof of citizenship/visa status when they resister for employer-paid payroll taxes. That's how every single other first word country does it.
And sure, even then you're left with is millions of people working without anybody collecting employer-paid payroll taxes of their work, you're dealing with millions of "independent contractors" and the standard off-the-books shadow economy. But at least then you can nail them all for tax evasion. Keeping millions of people off the books and hiding envelopes of cash being passed around is a whole lot harder than just going "oops, I couldn't possibly have known, that would have been discriminatory and/or retaliatory! It's the liberals fault!"
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