pbmonster
1d ago
But yeah, a lot of young women just treat the workplace as another playground for being cute ("aww here's me being cuuttte") and doing cute, fun things
I'm still convinced the women surviving lay-offs after making those videos were hired exactly to make those videos. She's a product manager, but the product she's managing is the public perception of Meta's work culture and status as an employer. Which doesn't mean she treating this as a playground -it means she's fantastic at her job. 3.4M views in 24 hours is respectable, even if most of those were rage-baited into watching.
pbmonster
1d ago
I dont remember hearing any claims of sexual orientation manifesting pre-puberty.
Anecdotally, I have clear childhood memories of being fascinated by boobs/curves/legs way, way before puberty. Finding a stack of Playboy magazines was a treasure by first grade. The male form never got anywhere close to being that visually appealing.
pbmonster
3d ago
That's just insurance socialism with extra fewer steps, right? The American public would never accept it. "Why should I, with my beautiful fast clotting blood and strong infection resistance, pay more for a procedure that will barely keep me in a bed for one night?"
Agreed on all points, maybe my original answer should have included the remark that both mirrors and sunshades are pretty dumb - but fun to think about.
I'm pretty sure that indiscriminate general shading of the planet would substantially disrupt crop production as well as wild flora.
To be pedantic, the sunshade-at-Lagrange-Point-1 idea would really just dim the sun by 2%. No matter if you use thousands of independent sunshades or one big one, when viewed from Earth it will only occlude a tiny part of the suns disk. Every spot on earth would receive 98% of normal sunlight. This wouldn't "substantially" disrupt crop production, it would just diminish it by around 2% (naively - except in cases where the limiting factor is available water or soil nitrogen/phosphorus or pests/weeds or ...). Making a sunshade that's larger but transmits the red and blue wavelegths relevant for photosynthesis would be smart, but probably even more ludicrously expensive than just having a thin film of aluminum on a polymere membrane which indiscriminately reflects all sun light.
Ultimately, if it matters you could also pretty easily "turn off" a sunshade by flipping it 90° (you probably need this capability anyway, because you have some degree of maneuverability in space using radiation pressure). If you really need a boost to the global growing season a little, you could always just turn it off.
pbmonster
4d ago
Wouldn't actually extending the day with a giant space mirror significantly mess up the climate, plants, and animal behavior?
If you're sending up space mirrors to orbit in order to light your cities, you can just as easily send up space sunshades to the Lagrange point in order to fine-tune global temperature - blocking only 2% of sun light from reaching the earth would cancel global warming. You'd also need less sunshades than space mirrors, since the sunshade always deflects sun light, while the space mirror supposedly only puts light onto the planet for a few hours per day in winter.
But yes, it would mess with plants and animals - though probably less than current light pollution does.
pbmonster
5d ago
seem to be resting on their laurels with Windows
How I wish they would have just rested on their laurels. Windows 7 was fine. Windows 10 was fine. They could have just kept shipping security patches indefinitely, and people would have kept buying their real cash cows. If you absolutely need to have an entire pyramid of managers scrambling for bonuses, they could have shipped incremental updates for Windows 7, unified the UI a bit more and slowly brought in new security features - optionally, as user hardware allows. It never was going to be good anyway, so they might as well have kept it cheap and consistent.
But no. They needed to fuck with it heavily. Managers needed to leave their mark, and so we got Windows 8 and 11...
pbmonster
11d ago
Republicans could have, at any time, used their Senate majority to end the shutdown by over-ruling the parliamentarian and invoking cloture with less than 60 votes.
But that's the nuclear option, right?
Changing/re-interpreting the Senate rules by majority vote, effectively lowering the cloture threshold permanently for ordinary legislation, would change the entire game. And it would certainly come back to bite the Republicans the very next time the Democrats gain power.
pbmonster
17d ago
It seems more likely that it was not a lack of money that caused the hesitancy to spend more on military equipment, but rather that they did not want to divert money from social services, schools, hospitals, and other government expenditures.
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.
pbmonster
23d 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
23d 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
23d 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
24d 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
26d 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
2mo 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.
That's too funny. Did the most incompetent offspring of the head of the city council read Wikipedia under "rent seeking", and decided to do a 100% speedrun?
That has to be a scam, like Blackrock buying up trailer parks to get a captive customer base. I bet the electrical mains are to small for a heat pump without district heat, and I bet the price of the land explodes after you've been paying their interest rates for them for 15 years...
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