roystgnr
1mo ago
an anti-hobo lock that you need three fingers to open
How's that work, exactly? I know they live a hard lifestyle at the best of times, and apparently they're now losing fingers to xylazine too in some areas, but I would have assumed that most hobos still have 8 or 9 fingers, minimum, nowhere near down to 3 per hand even.
roystgnr
1mo ago
It wasn't until the 1980s that they became popular for carrying books to school
You just blew my mind.
Though in hindsight I now understand why "he offered to carry her books" was a big childhood romance story trope, in media not much older than I am...
roystgnr
1mo ago
The wheels themselves, even on many expensive luggages, are of dubious quality
I've heard a theory that this was the problem: if even modern wheels are of dubious quality and capability, how much worse would they have been a hundred years ago? I'm not sure that makes sense, though. The invention of wheeled luggage is at roughly the same time the transition of roller skates from all-metal wheels to hard polymer wheels (which were lighter and smoother-rolling and less expensive), but all-metal wheels aren't that much worse in utility and they were probably better for durability. The most important invention for small wheels is ball bearing support, and that's more like 100-150 years old (at various levels of quality and expense).
The two other common theories are more situational:
Wheeled luggage came about during the expansion of mass air travel, with it's corresponding huge concourses and lack of porters. This was the first time people really had reason to want to carry their own luggage for long distances.
Wheeled luggage came about shortly after the Women's Rights Movement made it more common for women to travel on their own, and whereas a typical man would feel weak if he avoided carrying his own luggage, a typical woman would feel foolish if she didn't.
I'm not sure either of these really works either, though. Wheeled luggage was invented in 1970, but as another comment points out it didn't become popular until the 1990s. Perhaps that's because of the addition of the retractable handle (invented in 1987) finally making them more ergonomic to roll around? And maybe 17 years isn't too painfully long for someone to come up with that idea once it finally had a use case; "The Retractable Handle" isn't exactly the sort of thing you find at the start of the Civ tech tree next to "The Wheel".
roystgnr
1mo ago
The Spanish straight up genocided the entire now-world despite knowing it was their germs causing it.
[citation needed]
The first microscopes capable of seeing "animalcules" date back to 1674, and as late as ~1850 we still have people like John Snow and Ignaz Semmelweis still fighting an uphill battle with their controversial theories of "cholera can spread in drinking water" and "doctors should wash their hands in between examining corpses and delivering babies".
Back in the 1500s understanding of disease was so bad that we still don't even know which diseases were responsible for the majority of New World deaths. The earliest massive plague was smallpox, but the dozen-odd plagues of "cocoliztli" are still named by that generic Nahuatl (Aztec) word for "pestilence" because nobody knows which of a half dozen candidate germs were the actual cause.
For that matter, some diseases spread so much faster than the conquerors who first transmitted them that we don't know how bad the death toll was! In hindsight we believe that a lot of European colonist reports of "gosh, look how beautiful this unspoiled wilderness is" in North America were from people describing recently-carefully-tended forests whose caretakers had just been devastated by epidemics.
This isn't to excuse any of the colonists' deliberate crimes, of course. After the rest of his Patuxet tribe had been killed by an epidemic, the proper way to treat Squanto should have been sympathy and charity, not abduction. Some of the colonized nations' treatment was "Pretty close to slavery", and some was literal "we'll take you to the slave market to sell now" slavery.
roystgnr
1mo ago
You can use the greywater from the washing machine for the orchard, if you're into that kind of thing.
I love reducing waste, but a few nitpicks: you probably only want to use the rinse water, and you still want to be careful about what kind of detergent you use, and you're only going to get enough waste water from the family clothes washer to cover a tree or two, so do have additional irrigation plans for anything large enough to call an orchard.
(my parents weren't "into" that, but they were frugal and we lived in a desert, so my dad would often switch the washer drain from a sewer line to a hose-out-on-the-lawn for a load's final rinse cycle)
roystgnr
1mo ago
It did just the opposite on my phone. Could be that it's something that was tweaked for one CPU type at the expense of others?
roystgnr
1mo ago
Consider https://youtube.com/@mathmajor for undergrad-level (and math major focus, as it says on the tin) math. I've really only dug into two series there so far, but for the topic I'm already familiar with I'm not noticing any mistakes or omissions, and for the topic I'm only half-familiar with the exposition is clear enough that I'm improving.
roystgnr
1mo ago
The idea of technological determinism (of which "when technological changes to economics says we don't need these people, ethics will evolve to agree" would be an example) is still a pretty controversial one, I think, for lots of both bad and good reasons.
Marx was a huge early booster of technological determinism, and other ideas among Marx's favorites were so genocidally foolish that we should default to being skeptical in individual cases, but it's not proven that every idea of his was a bad one. He also didn't apply the idea very successfully, but perhaps that's just not easy for people whose foolishness reaches "death toll" levels.
There are some cases where trying to apply the idea seems to add a lot of clarity. The emergence of modern democracies right around the time that military technology presented countries with choices like "supplement your elite troops with vastly larger levies of poor schlubs with muskets" or "get steamrollered by Napoleon" sure doesn't sound like a coincidence. But, it's always easier to come up with instances and explanations like that with hindsight rather than foresight. Nobody seems to have figured out psychohistory yet.
There are also some cases where trying to apply the idea doesn't seem to add so much clarity. Africans with mostly spears vs Europeans with loads of rifles led to colonialism, chalk one up for determinism, but then Africans with mostly rifles vs Europeans with jets and tanks wasn't a grossly more even matchup and it still ended up in decolonization. These days we even manage to have international agreement in favor of actually helpless beneficiaries like endangered species. Perhaps World War 2 just made it clear that "I'm going to treat easy targets like garbage but you can definitely trust me" isn't a plausible claim, so ethics towards the weak are a useful tool for bargaining with the strong? But that sounds like it might extend even further, too. To much of the modern world, merely keeping-all-your-wealth-while-poor-people-exist is considered a subset of "treating easy targets like garbage", and unless everybody can seamlessly move to a different Schelling point (libertarianism might catch on any century now), paying for the local powerless people's dole from a fraction of your vast wealth might just be a thing you do to not be a pariah among the other people whose power you do care about. If population was still booming, the calculation of net present value of that dole might be worrisome (let's see, carry the infinity...), but so long as the prole TFR stays below replacement (or at least below the economic growth rate), their cost of living isn't quite as intimidating.
That theory sounds like just wishful thinking about the future, but to be fair a lot of recent history sounds like wishful thinking by older historical standards.
This is all wildly speculative, of course, but so is anything in the "all-powerful and perfectly obedient machinery" future. I stopped in the middle of writing this to help someone diagnose a bug that turned out to be coming from a third party's code. Fortunately none of this was superintelligent code, so when it worked improperly it just trashed their chemical simulation results, not their biochemistry.
roystgnr
1mo ago
assertion that many people on the Motte hold tech jobs of the kind found in Silicon Valley
doesn't accurately describe
most of the Motte works in Sillicon Valley
but I'm more astonished by the contrast between
uncontroversial
versus
you and ten other people angrily surge out of the woodwork
It looks like you might have a habit of choosing words inaccurately for the purposes of hyperbole, and that's a bit rough when you're some place like this where Aspergery people like me and your challengers upthread are welcomed, but it's easy enough to fix: when you get called out on it just admit the error, compose an accurate rewording (without pretending it's just an equivalent paraphrase) instead, and you're done. Everybody makes mistakes. Doubling down is just digging the hole deeper.
A lottery is very similar to insurance.
This is true only in the same sense that negative ten is similar to ten. They're both numbers, right? But they're opposite numbers. Likewise, here one gamble increases volatility (because the payoff is the only random event), and the other reduces it (because the payoff happens only when it cancels out a random expense; the net change from the random outcome is reduced).
But one of the two is supposedly justified while the other breaks their model and makes no sense whatsoever.
It makes sense, for the reasons above. Does it make sense to you too, now? If not, I'm afraid that's probably the best I can do. I've taught grad school math classes, which says good things about my math ability but bad things about my teaching ability...
roystgnr
1mo ago
Most financially literate people understand that it is irrational to insure your TV or phone against breakage, yet claim it is reasonable to insure anything bigger.
By the time you get up to the scale of home insurance, they're correct. That's how diminishing utility of money works. You have a risk r of losing v value from your total wealth of w, and your utility is generally an affine transform of log(w). r·log(w-v)+(1-r)·log(w) < log(w-r·v) for 0<r<1, so if somehow you could find someone who would insure you with no transaction costs or expected profit then you'd want to take it every time. Transaction costs c are roughly constant and expected profit P scales like p·v, though, so now your right hand side is log(w-c-(r+p)·v) and (for p>0 and c>0) you only get the same inequality for large enough v.
Gambling that you won't lose a few days' pay is a better bet than gambling that you won't lose (for the median homeowner considering home insurance) the majority of your net worth, even if the odds and the profit margins you're paying for are the same in each case, because bigger gambles are worse. This is the same reason why it's a good idea to invest most of your money in a stock market index, a worse idea to invest the same money in an average stock, and a crazy idea to invest most of your money in stocks at 4x leverage. It's one way to derive the Kelly criterion. For the same expected returns, less volatility is better, and since it's not infinitesimally better, it's still better even if it comes with slightly reduced expected returns. Your house burning down doesn't have to threaten your existence to be worth insuring against, it just has to be worse in expected utility than paying an insurer. You don't even have to pay a slimy one.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Also, the 3 tech examples you posted all mostly occurred during the 2000-2010 decade, whereas a lot of the flops (crypto, blockchain, NFTs, VR, etc. ) are considerably more recent.
In 1998, well into the internet boom, we had a Nobel(-Memorial)-prize-winning economist claiming that
The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law' — which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants — becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.
Sometime it takes a while to be sure something really isn't going to flop.
Conversely, when something really flops, we tend to forget about it. I'd have pointed out the Segway (2001), which was supposed to revolutionize cities before it became relegated to weird tourists and mall cops. Anybody else remember the CueCat?
And sometimes it's still hard to tell which category something is in. I'd have counted VR as a 1990s flop (I first put on a headset for an arcade game circa 1992), for instance, but 2020s VR is a niche but actually kind of fun, and at this rate maybe 2040s VR/AR will be ubiquitous and useful. Electric cars were a 19th century invention and a 20th century joke before we finally accumulated the technology to give them good performance.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Annoying favor request: would you find the location (Book+Chapter number) of what you feel was the first really exciting rug-pull, add a random number of chapters between 0% and 20% of the count up to that point to avoid this being a total spoiler, and tell me?
I started reading A Practical Guide to Evil at one point a couple years ago, but didn't make it very far before getting a little bored of it and moving to something else. I'm no stranger to fiction that takes a little while (Mother of Learning) or a long while (Babylon 5) to introduce itself before it gets really good, but I feel like I need some place at which to say "either I like it by here, or it's just not my cup of tea".
roystgnr
1mo ago
If you train a sufficiently large LLM on chess games written in some notation, the most efficient way to predict the next token will be for it to develop pathways which learn how to play chess -- and at least for chess, this seems to mostly have happened.
Yeah, but surprisingly poorly. 2024-era LLMs can be prompted to play chess at amateur to skilled amateur levels, but to get to the superhuman levels exhibited by doing move evaluations with a chess-specific neural net, you need to train it using self-play too, and to get to the greatly-superhuman levels exhibited by the state-of-the-art chess neural networks of several years ago, you need to also combine the neural nets with a framework like Monte Carlo Tree Search. Just pushing human data into a neural network only gets you a third of the way there.
I'd guess that the "just pushing human data into a neural network only gets you a third of the way there" rule of thumb applies to a lot more than just chess, but it's a lot harder to "self-play" with reality than it is with chess, so we can't just make up the difference with more core-hours this time. Using "reasoning" models has helped, a little like how tree search helps in chess, by allowing models to try out multiple ideas with more than just one token's worth of thinking before backtracking and settling on their answer, but with a chess or go tree search there's still a ground truth model keeping things from ever going entirely off the rails, and reasoning models don't have that. I'm not sure what the AGI equivalent of self-play might be, and without that they're still mostly interpolating within rather than extrapolating outside the limits of their input data. Automation of mathematical proofs is perhaps the most "real-world" area of thought for which we can formalize (using a theorem language+verifier like Lean as the ground truth) a kind of self-play, but even if we could get LLMs to the point where they can come up with and prove Fermat's Last Theorem on their own, how much of the logic and creativity required for that manages to transfer to other domains?
roystgnr
1mo ago
"Small Gods"
But I had to look that up, so clearly it's been too long for me too...
roystgnr
1mo ago
Women seem to generally have an edge at firearm marksmanship, and given how few women are evenly remotely interested this probably has some form of genetic basis.
Is this an edge for the right tail (women win more events), or an edge for the average competitor (the mean/median woman competing does better than the mean/median man)? The former would be extremely impressive in the context of reduced interest (uninterested women who could have become winners don't even compete, yet the remaining women are still better enough to win), but the latter is just what you would expect from selection bias (the less talented women are more likely to quit than the less talented men, so the latter bring down the male average but the former don't bring down the female average).
Anecdotally, I've heard multiple different firearms instructors report that on average women learn faster than men, and they generally attribute it to humility - by the time they've convinced their male students to "unlearn" bad habits, their female students have already started perfecting good habits. The people saying this included some who are unabashedly sexist in the opposite direction in other contexts, so I don't think their reports here were just "women are wonderful" bias. They might be comparing averages to averages and so just reporting what we'd expect from selection bias, though. Some may also have other unconscious motives to want to encourage women - another common anecdote is that the men in a mixed-sex training class tend to work much harder after they realize the women are starting to beat them.
I'm just commenting "Discworld" here because I'm only allowed to upvote @PokerPirate once.
To make my comment less redundant, here's the Discworld Reading Order Guide. IMHO although the best starting points depend on your taste, you can't really go wrong with "Guards! Guards!" or "Mort".
The reading order is worthwhile to avoid missing backstory (or to let you know what backstory you can miss - "The Color of Magic" wasn't nearly as good as his later books), but the books get even better as you go on. I could name stories by many authors that set me on edge from the suspense, or teary-eyed from the tragedy, or laughing from the comedy, but I'm having trouble thinking of anything other than Pratchett's "Thud!" that managed to do all three at once, and with a single line that would make no sense whatsoever out of context.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Seriously???
Back when I got the start of the series, they were all so hard to find in the US that I had to order a used set off eBay from the UK. I had no idea that some were hard to find but others were impossible.
roystgnr
1mo ago
The Charger kinda makes sense in-universe.
Designed a hundred years after the Reunification War and a hundred years before the Periphery revolts, it's clearly a pork project for contractors and a prestige mech for warriors who don't fight wars. "Oh, you pilot scout mechs, but you've kissed enough ass to get promoted high, and even though we don't fight wars you're still terrified that you'll get blown to pieces if a war starts and an opponent sneezes on you? How about if we give you a "scout" mech that's four times the tonnage, so you can still run around like you're trained to do but you can also take a few hits and run away if needed? Oh, wait, you also want to occasionally fight, in a mech that's only good at running? I guess... charge?"
Then actual wars start, and things go all Mad Max, and you'd think the Charger would be pointless ... except the things have already been mass produced, and in a setting where nothing high-tech is still getting mass produced there's actually some selection bias in favor of mechs where all the high-tech expense is in a well-protected engine and most non-terminal damage they take is just cheaply replaced armor plating. It's surely no longer going to be prestigious to pilot a mech whose primary mission capabilities are "overweight scout", "fisticuffs", and "distraction", but just having any mech is much better than not having one and beggars can't be choosers.
(It makes sense as much as anything else in-universe, anyways. They have affordable multi-thousand-ton continuous-1G-acceleration interplanetary DropShips, but their major battles are focused on destroying 10-meter-tall vehicles that move at less than 100kph? Have they considered just pushing a few guided tungsten rods out an airlock before they finish decelerating?)
roystgnr
1mo ago
I'm pretty worried modern games are crack
This is true of many modern games (nearly anything you can play on a phone...) but not all.
and educational benefits or whatever are oversold and not real.
This is true of nearly all games, both modern and ancient. Minecraft is a great way to share a game world with your kids, but unless/until you go down the "making a microcontroller out of redstone" path, it's not an educational game. By far the greatest educational benefit we've seen from any video games is the simple fact that our kids will happily do extra educational activities to earn a little more of the limited "screen time" we allot for them.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Unless there’s some secret esoteric Mormonism going on in deep catacombs hidden not only from the public but also from run-of-the-mill members of the church — which I suppose we can’t rule out
There's a little bit of esoteric Mormonism hidden from members, but the trick is that the hiding spot isn't "underground", it's "the past". E.g. run-of-the-mill members of the church mostly eventually get to see the (officially-)secret present-day temple ceremonies, but their only access to previous ceremony versions is via the same "look at leaked copies or recordings" (or a wiki summary?) method as any member of the general public.
Well, the hiding spot is "the past" for most members, at least. I'd presume that at some level non-run-of-the-mill members get to see official records of previous ceremony versions, but that's just me trying to be charitable, because alternatives like "the Prophet isn't supposed to see all his church's past" or "he's just supposed to trust Wikipedia if he gets curious" would seem worse.
roystgnr
1mo ago
know for sure that your government will turn into Nazi Germany within a few years
I'm glad you're trying to steelman it, but isn't this a great counter-example to the "we don't need self-defense until it's almost too late" philosophy? Maybe 100k Jews got out of Germany to avoid the Nazis (peak Jewish-German population was in 1910, so many were surely leaving for other reasons too), and roughly another 350k got out after the Nazis took over but before they made emigration illegal and really started in on the mass murder of the remaining 150k ... but that didn't make as much difference as you'd think in the end, because the biggest single source of Holocaust deaths wasn't the victims who had failed to escape Nazi Germany, it was the 20 times as many Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. When Poland was invaded it had still been trying to negotiate a day before and it was conquered a month afterward. If you're only ready to defend yourself against corrupt establishments that give you a few years' warning then their natural countermove is to just not give you that much warning.
roystgnr
1mo ago
No spoiler tags? I know, I know, decades-old books, but you never know who's never read them but might like to.
I'd also say the Minds are godlike in the ancient "squabbling Greek pantheon" sense rather than the modern "omniscient + omnipotent" sense; they surely count as superintelligent, but e.g.
These both sound terrifying to me.
The investment value of BTC is either an underlying "BTC will become so convenient to transact with that everyone will want to keep balances in it" (which looks less likely to happen the longer it goes without happening) or a meta "you can sell your BTC to someone who'll pay even more for it for some reason" (which happens, but can't happen forever without a non-circular reason). The investment value of USD has an underlying "everyone in the US needs some to pay their taxes instead of going to jail", and that's great, but at some point either we're going to get the federal debt under control or we're going to monetize it and dilute your USD to nothing, and I'm not betting on "get the federal debt under control".
This is less terrifying. Sure, if the ASI kills everyone and/or mandates a Socialist Utopia then you're wasting a sweet camping-with-the-dog opportunity, but if property rights retain any respect then it'll be good to have equity in a wide enough array of investments to definitely include some companies who'll manage to surf the tidal wave rather than be crushed by it. A crashing dollar is going to hurt stocks but not as badly as it's going to hurt dollars.
Personally, I just wish I knew what to advise my kids. My index funds are at the "can pay for college if they don't go to med school" level, not the "idle rich" level. Even if AI progress levels off below superhuman, it looks like it will level off at somewhere around "can interpolate within the manifold of all existing human knowledge", and how much economic room is there for the vast majority of human knowledge workers in a world like that? Being able to personally push the boundaries of knowledge into previously uncharted territory used to be what you needed to do to get a PhD, not what you needed to do on a regular basis just to remain economically viable.
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