brownbat

45 ms·

151.
by brownbat 7y ago
This was way more appealing to me when they were able to provide (probably spurious) medical predictions, and before it was clear that the ancient ancestry assessments were so much guesswork. The cost of sequencing keeps rapidly halving, bu
152.
by brownbat 7y ago
The Flash requirement in 2020 kills me. Account synch gets stuck and never finishes. Correctly categorizing transactions usually involves pulling up my bank website to see how the charge was really originally described. Mint pulls some info
153.
by brownbat 7y ago
In general, reading histories of technology and economics, as well as histories of the claims of peak coal or peak oil, made it generally impossible for me to maintain the pessimistic view. The famous test of this is the Ehrlich bet.[12] Pa
154.
by brownbat 7y ago
First time I seriously started reading about peak oil was in 2006-7. Seemed like everyone online was talking about it with gas prices going up. I started to really worry, was seriously thinking of replacing my car with a moped. Future did s
155.
by brownbat 7y ago
It's worth going up a level in the directory and poking around. "24 interesting things that you learn about computers in the movies..." has become pretty outdated, but it's an interesting historical artifact. Imagine bal
156.
by brownbat 7y ago
Probably fair, I found it insightful, and held my expectations to something self published by someone in their spare time, but may not hold up to someone expecting a more professional work. The books I liked with more consistently higher ra
157.
by brownbat 7y ago
Yeah, it's admittedly more along the lines of an insightful blog post or a really good bar conversation than some kind of Rise and Fall, expectations management is probably due here. But it kind came on this crest of technological adva
158.
by brownbat 7y ago
Andy Kessler's How We Got Here. Only a few hundred people have rated it on GoodReads, but if you wanted to trace a march of technological progress from swords to the Internet, it does a good job. There are definitely other stories you
159.
by brownbat 7y ago
Searching gibberish to try to get as few results as possible. I got down to one with "qwerqnalkwea" "AEWRLKJAFsdalkjas" returns nothing, but youtube helpfully replaces that search with the likewise nonsensical "AEWR
160.
by brownbat 7y ago
Surely most engineers want the power of strict searching and less of the comforts of being always getting filler results, right? So... is there an internal service at Google that works correctly but they're hiding from the world? It mi
161.
by brownbat 7y ago
I feel like Google has often turned strict commands into fuzzy searching, maybe for a decade? I never heard a clear explanation as to why, I just imagined that it was some sort of A/B tested paternalism. Maybe most users really want fu
162.
Out of Left Fields: Dutch Land Art Installation Cuts Area Airplane Noise in Half(99percentinvisible.org)
2 points by brownbat 7y ago|0 comments
163.
by brownbat 7y ago
Kansas City already has a mix of great and terrible schools, like every metro area, segregated mostly by the cost of living in that particular district. They'd probably just move to the wealthier suburbs or send kids to high quality pr
164.
by brownbat 7y ago
I meant the latter, but "equally safe as the status quo" might not be sufficient here. If we built planes that were only as safe as highway driving, people would be outraged. We aren't exactly rational about this stuff, and w
165.
by brownbat 7y ago
Very comprehensive discussion. p39 correctly points out that post-election verifiability significantly reduces the burden on the system. If you can later prove your vote was cast correctly, it doesn't really matter if the system that c
166.
by brownbat 7y ago
The "edge case" I worry about is driving on ice or snow. Driving safely on frozen surfaces is not a solved problem for human drivers, but most of us insist it is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. If the vehicle drives as slowly
167.
by brownbat 7y ago
Nintendo integrated some ideas from the Wii into the Switch though, and the whole console market expects to constantly move on to new platforms and new generations of technology. So while individual consoles can be market successes or failu
168.
by brownbat 7y ago
The 20,000 Hz podcast provided a full history of this, discussing various samples along the way: https://www.20k.org/episodes/loudnesswars It's pretty standard for that podcast, which features lots of stories abou
169.
Throw a Prediction Party(lesswrong.com)
1 points by brownbat 7y ago|0 comments
170.
by brownbat 7y ago
Wow, that book is weird and interesting, thanks. It contains so many claims, from the obvious to the benign to the ridiculous... Suburbs are obsolete, cities are magical! All farms should be in valleys! People should probably exercise more,
171.
by brownbat 7y ago
Among the several puzzling assumptions in the article seems to be the idea that initial planning is the only story worth telling. It insists all those cities are "razor blades that cut up life," but the streets don't seem to
172.
by brownbat 7y ago
There are "X for busy people" series that provide abbreviated summaries of the core ideas in popular works of nonfiction. I suppose the gamble is that it's hard to know which nonfiction are mostly fluff in advance though.
173.
by brownbat 7y ago
These are good points and make me want to go back and yell at the study authors for pointing fingers at 2005 while ignoring the REPAYE Act. I think it's better terms than even you said -- 10% of discretionary. Discretionary is AGI minu
174.
by brownbat 7y ago
Interesting... that led me to this article: https://www.savingforcollege.com/article/history-of-student-... It's skeptical of those claims of abuse that seemed to originate in Congress, but nonetheless discusses
175.
by brownbat 7y ago
They have a really good discussion of this in the middle of the study, admitting it erodes predictive power. They point out that much of your lifetime earnings are predicted by your parents' level of education.
176.
by brownbat 7y ago
This is a really interesting addition to the literature if you dig through it, with subtle distinctions between income gains and wealth gains and interactions with demographics. It's not a simple "college ain't what it used t
177.
by brownbat 7y ago
> I'm not sure what children do today instead, but sailing isn't it anymore. We solved distraction as if it were a game of perfect information then we put it in everyone's pocket.
178.
by brownbat 7y ago
Malcolm X's speech on the ballot or the bullet puts this really profoundly. History is full of bloody revolutions. It takes democracy to make them bloodless. https://youtu.be/Sc4BPYIqm6k
179.
by brownbat 7y ago
This comes up in The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Chabon, an unique noirish alternate history dealing with chess and culture, among other things.
180.
Help Me Understand the Uber Cancellation Scam(onemileatatime.com)
1 points by brownbat 7y ago|0 comments

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