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
13d 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
13d 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
28d 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
29d 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
29d 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Classically, that's your skip-level's problem, right?
If you'd prefer to stay, you'd normally built a clear cut case for yourself as an example for the type of behavior you're unhappy with, and then request he deals with it. Depending on your relationship with the skip-level, you can directly try to be assigned to a different supervisor, get your supervisor assigned somewhere else (maybe there's a reason he's worried about his job), or at least try to have the behavior reigned in a bit. A team with lots of churn should worry the skip.
If your skip-level is bad or supportive of people being forced out, you might be out of luck and just paint a target on your back, though. So handle with care (or only do it after you've already got a few interviews lined up).
pbmonster
1mo ago
there are many competing ideologies and it isn’t clear to me which KSR thinks are the right ones.
To me it seemed that he design the gift economy some of the Martians end up with to be pretty utopian. But yes, he does't dwell on it, or even elaborate very much.
Also I think that terraforming Mars is a red herring. Are we really short of lebensraum on Earth? Easier to build cities and extract resources in Canada, Antarctica, the deep oceans, Russia, the Sahara.
All near-future space stories have this "problem". There's no good reason for humans to go live in space (besides escaping the "single planet trap" which hedges against catastrophes that are extremely unlikely, many of which would still leave the surviving humans on earth better of than the humans surviving in our potential colonies). The technology required to teraform Mars or building O'Neill cylinders would also fix most problems on earth, just orders of magnitude cheaper.
Let's get offworld certainly, advance as a civilization, secure Mars... but only with good reason. The costs must be outweighed by the benefits
What benefits?
What about Mercury, is there not a tonne of solar power there?
Around twice the delta-V of a Mars mission, if you start from Earth orbit. And for what, 7x the solar irradiance of Earth? Just built 7x the amount of panels here. That's going to be cheaper than shipping the panels (or the panel factories) to Mercury for a very, very long time. Also, once you have heavy industry on Mercury, you need to ship the... heavy goods back out, quickly depleting what little water there is on Mercury.
There are resources in the asteroids, let's get them.
Almost all asteroids are worse sources of metals than a decent mine on earth. So you get into a chicken-or-egg problem with asteroid mining: the only reason why you'd want to do it is because those resources are already in space. But if the only thing to built in space is infrastructure for getting resources, you can just skip the entire space-headache and do your project on Earth for a fraction of the cost!
In the end, it's an awesome scenario for stories, and we like telling stories. Either for entertainment, or for inspiration. But realistically/economically, I don't see a case for human space flight at all. And if you want to build cool/inspirational stuff, you can do a whole lot just with our moon and the space around it.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Is it just that cargo ships don't have much of a keel, so they only benefit from the component of the wind that's parallel to their course?
Can't imagine that's the case. The combination of tens of feet of draft and more than 10:1 aspect ratio of the hull should make significant lateral slip almost impossible. Even if sideward movement would be a problem, a relatively small, retractable foil at the front of the vessel should be able to compensate for that (in combination with the rudder).
I suspect bunker fuel is just to cheap. A kite system is purely additive (you need everything on board you've always needed, and then there's the new kite). So you save a couple of thousand dollars per day on fuel - if you're not becalmed, large parts of the Atlantic and Pacific are notoriously calm - but now need to train crew, maintain a new system, pay off the additional capex and deal with additional risk. The amortization period is probably to long for such a conservative industry.
When really using a shovel properly, hard, throughout a day, is a much more complicated physical task than the bench press is. Experience completing labor tasks will add to your ability in those tasks, no different from any athletic specialization.
I think most of the gym strength vs labor strength comes down to this.
On a practical level, most construction workers will have the added advantage of having both much higher work capacity in the movements most relevant to their work - gym strength is not commonly built by doing hundreds of reps (per hour, for 10 hours, in the sun) - and by having already built the mental fortitude necessary to complete hundreds of reps (per hour, for 10 hours, in the sun).
if someone tells me that they are strong but not with "gym muscles" then I know they aren't actually all that strong at all
The laborer will of course turn that around. The inability (in work capacity or mental fortitude) to lift all day is the same as not being "all that strong at all" - no matter what the little numbers on the plates say when they get moved around for a grand total of 10 minutes every other day.
pbmonster
1mo ago
They weren't strong
Often, they were extremely strong a decade (or two) ago, and are now in a chill, but meticulously managed decline. Especially if they managed to avoid long injuries, their muscles might not be bulging anymore, and might be covered by a layer of fat, but the muscle mass is still mostly there. Advanced age and sinking testosterone levels makes building muscle much more difficult, but careful maintenance is doable.
It's even more apparent in the endurance sports. If you look at 10k/half marathon/marathon times of senior/grandmaster division runners, they often maintain impressive amateur times into their sixties. The real performance cliff only seems to come in the late sixties.
but they knew how to leverage what strength they had.
This is, of course, also true.
pbmonster
1mo ago
The clothes themselves seem to be pretty standard ones, similar to what I see in every store, not some junk or second hand ones, so they must cost something? How these costs are covered? How are they ensured against loss or theft?
The answer to all of that is that those clothes cost almost nothing when you directly import them from China/Bangladesh/Vietnam. Single dollars, often cents, per item. It's all mass produced plastic garbage.
Go onto shein.com and sort cloths by "price, ascending". Bulk is even cheaper than that.
pbmonster
1mo ago
The clothes are sourced from others in the community, maybe a couple of whom acquire big volume discount merchandise from discount store closings, perhaps wholesale outlets etc, then sell them on.
And frequently, it's just the same plastic garbage Shein/Wish/AliExpress is selling, imported in bulk.
On vacation, my wife tried getting a cheap beach dress from those stands, the only criteria being "cotton or linen" and "kinda fits". The entire operation was abandoned because the first 5 people we tried didn't have a single piece of clothing not made of plastics.
pbmonster
1mo ago
That's also probably the ideal vessel for a sail system. Transporting bulky rocket parts below deck makes mounting the sails/masts straight forward, the low density cargo doesn't require a large displacement hull, and the ship probably doesn't need to run on a tight schedule. Container ships would have much more trouble finding room for the sails, and with more draft comes more hydrodynamic resistance, and so a requirement for much larger sails.
But maybe bulk carriers could get foils mounted cheaply and quickly. Even 0.1% fuel savings are a big deal in the industry.
Now I'm wondering what happened to all those startups that tried lashing a robotic kite to cargo ships...
pbmonster
1mo ago
I took a total of 14 days to complete the route, with 12 being “par”. Per day, I averaged:
72 kilometers 2050 meters of elevation gain 5,000 calories of energy expenditure
Hardo. Congratulations!
Beef is my favorite protein – the Eastern Swiss essentially don’t eat it because their income is tied to the cows staying alive. [...] The main dish is pork schnitzel. Maybe chicken nuggets if you’re lucky?
Did you exclusively go to the cheapest hole-in-the-wall farmer's pubs? Entrecote (beef) and cordon blue (veal) are absolute staples in traditional Swiss restaurants, and the restaurants like selling those because the margins are much better than the pork schnitzels.
Even the grocery stores are the size of a small American apartment and almost exclusively stock pork and dairy as calorie sources.
Grocery stores will have lots of pork, but again, the higher quality cuts of beef will always be available. Yes, the deli meat section will have not much other sources, and small stores might not have ground beef (only ground pork), but there's always a random cut of beef steak. Did you get the chance to visit a butcher shop?
There’s no side dish at any restaurant that’s not a potato.
Come on, the Swiss love their risotto rice and their Italian pasta.
pbmonster
1mo ago
For keeping me around? Same as most other team sports: charismatic coach, fun team mates, good built in social scene. Do you regularly go out for drinks/dinner after practice? Are your team mates... normal? I stopped kickboxing and BJJ because those attract a type of guys I can't hang with, in large numbers.
For starting? Convince me this is either more fun or a better workout than football/basketball/handball. Since I like the look of the classic swimmer physique, I'm already predisposed to believing the workout angle. Maybe stand next to your most broad-shouldered-and-slim-waisted team mate while recruiting.
Also, how's the learning curve? Am I going to be useless for the first year? That's no fun, I'd rather run after a ball if that's the case.
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.
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