pbmonster
5d ago
Cadence is a bit of a preference, some people just like to pedal slower with more force. Jan Ulrich was famous back then for running huge chain rings and paddling at like half the speed of Lance Armstrong. But yeah, if you keep dropping way below 90 because you can't sustain power on climbs, you just gotta downshift, accept the drop in speed and keep at it. Speed will go up with time. And like everybody in cycling loves to repeat endlessly: "It never gets any easier, you just go faster".
pbmonster
5d ago
I want to be holding around 15mph at least, and to do that I feel like I need to be able to hold 18mph for a few miles, which I really can't seem to do right now. My problem seems to be with cadence, I can't manage to move my legs fast enough for very long to sustain higher speeds.
Is it actually cadence or is sustained power the problem? Because if you just prefer to pedal slower, you could get into a higher gear. If your highest gear is to fast at 18 mph (improbable, but not impossible) this means switching bikes (or switching cassettes/chain ring if you like the bike).
pbmonster
5d ago
Then upgrade your cheese game! There's practically no limit on nobility variety, tastes and prices. Goes extremely well with potatoes, doesn't increase the complexity of preparation towards anything resembling "cooking", still nutritionally complete. And unless you actually dislike potatoes and/or cheese, it should be far more tasty than a can of Delicious Soylent Green (or it's modern successors).
pbmonster
6d ago
If we allow simple meals (inspired my the biryani benchmark) as meal-replacements, you could always peasant-maxx and just microwave potatoes.
Potatoes are very close to nutritionally complete when eaten with any kind of cheese or milk. Depending on how refined your taste in cheese is, it will knock restaurant/delivery biryani out of the water in terms of price per calorie. You can easily deal in total calories by adding butter.
pbmonster
8d ago
Western economies are built on services now, they're definitely productive.
I'm not convinced.
What percentage of the labor force feels their job are bullshit (creating PowerPoint slides nobody looks at, writing code for projects that get canceled, ect.)? What percentage of the labor force does redundant work (picking a 10 year old meme to avoid AI complications: how many startups selling monthly subscriptions to Kanban boards does an economy really need? Or on a larger scales: How on earth are Nissan, Landrover and Mini still selling even a single car?)
The West has an established culture on how to operate businesses, and many of those businesses make money. But this could be a local maximum in productivity under current conditions, not a global maximum. That's why I'm so fascinated by the rise of China. I'm curious to see what kind of maximum they'll find.
pbmonster
14d ago
Since most problems can be solved with plastic money, I have a second credit card for travelling. I keep it separate from the rest of my valuables, usually at the bottom of my suitcase. That way, I have 3 sources of money: wallet, phone and travel credit card. So in your scenario, I'd be walking into my hotel room with security/reception staff saying "There's a black master card with my name on it behind this zipper, which I will tip you with. The Card Verification Value is 123."
If that's not enough, we might need to look at CCTV footage of the reception area from when I checked in.
pbmonster
15d ago
Unsurprising, isn't it? If we normalize for the number of women in EE author positions (let's say grad school and above), I wouldn't have expected more, especially if you have papers from the '90s in that database.
pbmonster
20d ago
Television sets or (preferably) projector screens are for movie watching in company. Watching something together is fun.
But when I'm watching alone, I prefer studio headphones and my 30" 4K monitor 3' away from my face. It feels more immersive than IMAX (except for the bass, can't beat feeling explosions with your diaphragm).
pbmonster
23d ago
Yeah, state of the art FAB is really only necessary for advanced autonomous functionality.
And it's not even any of the more recent AI shit, classic computer vision algorithms, millimeter wave phased array 4D radar or synthetic aperture radar just need to solve a shitload of Fourier transforms, in real time.
But it's worth noting that you can do a lot - and a lot more than we've seen in Ukraine so far - even with just 65nm.
pbmonster
24d ago
But full autarky is (and never was) the goal of subsidies. Most countries spend billions on agriculture, and still end up importing a very large percentage of the food consumed during peace time. And that's ok, what matters is having the people, the knowledge and the supply chains set up just in case. Because scaling up and retooling is so much easier than building from scratch, and having the civilian consumer market collapse is a far smaller problem than having your military supply constrained.
So, you don't actually want to mimic the world economy on chips, batteries and REE. Any single type of small brushless motor is enough. Any single type of microcontroller - several generations behind state of the art FAB - is enough. Any type of niche battery format is enough. The rest can be scaled and retooled when necessary.
are there ways to legislate outside of tariffs to prevent this sort of major sell off of strategic business to adversarial nations?
The classic way to do this is just subsidies. If you want strategic resources or production capabilities to stay domestic, you can always just pay for it. This has - across many different nations and decades - worked mostly OK, especially for strategic essentials like food and energy production. Most western nations spend around 2% of GDP on that.
You could double that spending and easily get everything from domestic batteries to chips, from steel to rare earth metals for it. It's an absolutely enormous amount of money, after all.
And while it's probably not the most efficient way to do it since you distort/steer the market (that's the whole point), and if you overdo it you might need some export tariffs (you probably do not want to use tax dollars to subsidize foreign consumers - unless you're China and want to bankrupt your competitors production capability), it will get results.
Yeah, but you don't strictly need an entire smart home setup for that. The ghetto setup I'd use looks something like that: set the space heater thermostat to whatever number corresponds to 20C, plug them into any Chinese ethernet power strip, connect the power strip to your router.
The rest depends a little on the router/modem you have, but basically all modern prosumer/enterprise routers or just any openWRT box will allow you to just send the power-ON command to the power strip once you've connected from the outside. I'd just use SSH over VPN to trigger a one-line bash script.
If you want to monitor the inside temperature, you could add a cheap Raspi + analog thermometer to the setup, which you can also query over SSH.
UPD: if anyone wants to read it, it's https://sifter.org/%7Esimon/AfterLife/index.html
Great story, thought-provoking, thanks for the recommendation! Nice contrast to Lena, and I like the context being implanted in dreams. Personally, I think Lena has the more realistic picture of how the entire mind upload affair would turn out...
pbmonster
1mo ago
They sell product at every tier, but even their entry-level/cheap stuff (Turney, Altera, Acera) works well enough to ride around. If you buy a used bike for $200 and it has Shimano gearset and Shimano disk brakes, you don't even need to open google. It's going to be fine if it's new-ish, and it's going to be easy to replace components if they're EOL.
And if you spend more money or if you start comparing bikes, you can quickly figure out which component families are entry-tier and which are mid-tier.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Wouldn't the woman most likely be a vegan or Buddhist or some other kind of weirdo?
This will vary by location, but in my experience the majority of white women with college degrees do yoga and/or pilates. The classes they go to also by and large don't do the hippie breathing/meditating stuff anymore, they've all reduced it down to the flow between more-or-less demanding postures.
pbmonster
1mo ago
For most of my use, the context window is more than large enough. I use it mainly to prevent context poisoning.
If a LLM goes down an unhelpful path (it locks onto information that is either too specific and in the wrong direction, or to general, or I catch it hallucinating), I find it very important for performance to remove those tokens from the context entirely. Saying "no, that's not what I mean. Let's go more towards X" is far inferior to just purging the previous answer and directly supplying X.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Alright, so it's about comparable to motorcycle riding (another popular (lower-)middle class activity), rather than horse riding or private aviation. Thanks!
pbmonster
1mo ago
Getting a hunting license is too expensive
Interesting, do you have a rough number? I know quite a few German hunters, some I'd clock towards lower middle class.
pbmonster
2mo ago
This is certainly also a possible explanation from a genetics point of view, it just means prehistory was orders of magnitude more violent than the alternative explanation would require.
It all depends a bit on rates of male intermixing between tribes, but unless sons basically never leave their father's tribes, it would require very frequent mass murder. As often as every generation. If sons never leave, mass murder every few generations is enough.
Likely, the opposite is true. Young men frequently leave their tribes to strike out on their own in small groups of brothers an cousins.
pbmonster
2mo ago
If you have specific examples in mind, or want to talk about specific terms or ideas, I'd be happy to try to explain them.
The easiest way to get away from pseudobabble is to state a testable hypothesis. Specific, falsifiable, measurable, and ideally: interesting. Do you have one?
pbmonster
2mo ago
The only reason Torquemada and the rest of the Inquisition didn't kill everyone was because Torquemada didn't have access to machine guns and gas chambers.
I'm not convinced, the lack of gas chambers and machine guns didn't slow down the Mongols - or a number of Chinese generals - very much.
pbmonster
2mo ago
Most men who reached adulthood reproduced and weren't murdered.
Genetic diversity in mitochondrial DNA is much greater than in Y-chromosome DNA. The most common explanation for this this is that around 80% of women reproduced, while only about around 40% of men did.
Human prehistory was both violent and non-egalitarian.
Now, Mars is close enough to Earth that it's not an effective hedge against these catastrophes
What are you worried about? Volcanism or impactor would certainly spare Mars. We'd need to be extremely unlucky for a gamma ray burst to take out either Earth or Mars, but for both getting hit, we'd need to be absurdly unlucky. What else? Close-by supernova? I think we ruled out most candidates, there are no geriatric stars in our direct neighborhood.
The first two candidates certainly could end human civilization on Earth, but they usually only happen every few tens of millions of years. On such extreme timelines, it's unlikely humans would still be around, just from an evolutionary view. Also, humans being the cockroaches of the mammalian class, we'd probably have a pretty good chance to survive a minor event, at least as a species (if not as a civilization). After all, we eat everything and live everywhere.
Fortunately, we likely have millions, if not billions, of years, to get human civilization sustainable on another planet that's safe from these guaranteed catastrophes on Earth, which is a lot of time to research and develop innovations to enable us getting off Earth.
It's a few hundred millions, max. After that, the sun will slowly increase its irradiance by a relatively small percentage, resulting in a runaway greenhouse effect from atmospheric water vapor, which will end the carbon cycle on Earth.
So, those timelines are so extremely long (and as such, the probabilities of an extinction event in the next couple of hundred years), we can worry about them when we get really, really bored. The problems we have to solve before that need to be solved here, because solving them here is cheaper than living in space or on Mars.
pbmonster
2mo ago
I don't know about acceptable ways that can be used right there, in the moment, in a social situation, that go beyond giving the target a death glare and maybe clenching a fist in your pocket
With enough verbal intelligence, you can also get away with quite some veiled ridicule or malicious compliance, while maintaining enough plausible deniability that shouldn't get your parents called. We had a class clown that got very entertaining when angry... I'm sure it made him feel better (especially in public with people laughing), although raising your kids to be obnoxious little shits might not be exactly advisable.
They also - just like the US - really don't want to be seen as escalating. The Germans debated endlessly about giving Ukraine a couple of long range Taurus missiles. But they are afraid of what the Ukrainians are going to do with them, and the Russians told them they would consider a Taurus hitting deep infrastructure as Germany having entered the war.
So, no Taurus. They got Iris-T air defense systems and another $2B in military aid instead.
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