bryananderson

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31.
by bryananderson 3y ago
Sorry but I can’t stand when someone takes their own dissatisfaction (which is entirely valid, it’s your life after all) and generalizes it to a grand social theory in a way that is simultaneously immensely self-important (everyone who isn’
32.
by bryananderson 3y ago
For what it’s worth, there is also a wide variance in grading between different indoor gyms and different outdoor climbing areas. Yosemite grades are notoriously hard; the most popular gym chain in California (which I love!) grades are noto
33.
by bryananderson 3y ago
Basically this, and it’s a bigger deal than it may sound. Competent technical management is a scarce commodity worth its weight in gold around NASA Goddard. A lot of (both frontline and upper) management has no technical background and it s
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by bryananderson 3y ago
I get what he means, but I have a hard time thinking of three words that give me more chills than “go for TLI”!
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by bryananderson 3y ago
Michael Collins—who was bumped from Apollo 8 due to a medical issue and of course ended up flying Apollo 11 instead—became increasingly convinced with time that it was Apollo 8, more so than 11, that represented the true landmark in human h
36.
by bryananderson 3y ago
There’s some worthwhile stuff here about how perverse incentives lead to pathological outcomes in large organizations, but… > Here's the pressure if you're in the 10% of people that aren't crud at their jobs - you're
37.
by bryananderson 3y ago
> It's not that they can't attempt to do it, it's that they can't do it efficiently. The US has some of the highest healthcare costs in the world. You’re right, the fact that America’s government-run single-payer heal
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by bryananderson 3y ago
The inability of Americans to see that anything beyond America even exists is really something to behold
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by bryananderson 3y ago
It’s too bad there aren’t any other rail systems operating in similar coastal conditions in the world! Certainly not in Vancouver or Portland or San Francisco or Northwesten Europe. If only there were, so that Seattle could buy off the shel
40.
by bryananderson 3y ago
Restaurants closed for about 6 weeks in some regions in December-January, and ICUs statewide were at 0% capacity in late December so I’d say that was a really good idea. That still doesn’t reach a year after the first shutdowns, and anyway
41.
by bryananderson 3y ago
What lockdown? Not a single jurisdiction in the US did a true lockdown like New Zealand, Italy, etc. Not even for two weeks. I also can’t think of anywhere in the US where anything was still mandated closed a single year after it started, l
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by bryananderson 3y ago
Human-rating the then-new Falcon 9 launch vehicle was part of SpaceX’s award for Commercial Crew starting in 2011, and the launch vehicle did not delay the program, so I think it counts. Falcon 9 had flown twice when NASA made the initial a
43.
by bryananderson 3y ago
I think the difference between the “private” development of Dragon and the “government” development of Mercury is exaggerated. Like Dragon, the Mercury capsule was (mostly) designed and (entirely) built by a private contractor, McDonnell Ai
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by bryananderson 3y ago
Falcon 9 (plus Dragon) is the definitive counterexample. The jury on Starship remains out.
45.
by bryananderson 3y ago
One adjustment you could make is to slowly rotate into bonds (also via a highly diversified fund) as you approach retirement to dampen volatility (at the cost of lower returns, but hopefully that’s fine by the time you’re approaching retire
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by bryananderson 3y ago
Me! I’ve only ever bought total market index funds and they’re just gonna sit there for as long as I live, no matter what. If the world’s total stock value crashes permanently, I’m probably worried about something other than my retirement p
47.
by bryananderson 3y ago
I think this misses the point. The full system for humans is “vision + brain” and for self-driving its “sensors + planner”. The Waymo/Cruise philosophy is that since we don’t know how to make the planner human-brain-level, we should sh
48.
by bryananderson 3y ago
The assertion that something is always there even when there’s absolutely no evidence for it is an unfalsifiable “Russell’s teapot” argument. It is trivially true that someone makes money from every project; the land, labor, and materials h
49.
by bryananderson 3y ago
> No, but another key insight is that it helps corruption very much if it's completed and delivers the promised benefits, since it means less chances for people to complain, and for later investigations (e.g. by political opponents
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by bryananderson 3y ago
> But the alternative is not a project done right. It's a project than never got started because no one saw opportunity for personal gain in it. Think of all the places that don't have high speed rail projects, let alone high
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by bryananderson 3y ago
> Corruption is one of the main reasons those project go anywhere. People in positions of power want to do them because they can get money on the side while they are done. This misunderstands the relationship between corruption and sta
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by bryananderson 3y ago
Yes, the procurement situation in the United States is at least an order of magnitude more dire than in Italy.
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by bryananderson 3y ago
> Really? I thought the reason was corruption! Perhaps if we all think positively it goes away! I could have added a few words to my comment to make it clearer: “This meek fetal-position defeatism in the face of corruption is why in
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by bryananderson 3y ago
> Perhaps, but if we're being practical we should account for a similar increase in costs to any future solution. It's not like corruption will go away by the time the procurements for the next project go on... This meek feta
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by bryananderson 3y ago
> Many people think 'global warming' (or 'climate change' as it now called) is 80% snake oil and that there are many alarmist evangelizing grifters making a fortune and changing the global balance of power in its name
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by bryananderson 3y ago
If all they want to do is supplant Patreon, fine, maybe they can? But Patreon’s valuation seems to be 1-2B. That doesn’t move the needle and is anyway far less ambitious than the stated “everything app” goal for payments.
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by bryananderson 3y ago
The payments thing is nonsense. Why would anyone want to use Twitter for payments when they could use a ton of existing options that work fine? Remember, Snapchat tried payments too. And that at least sort of made sense, since people alread
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by bryananderson 3y ago
> Not only should the voter be marking their ballot by hand not doing so through a machine whose UI may have bugs, but any scanner must scan the human-readable marks, not some machine-readable marks because the voter can't check tha
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by bryananderson 3y ago
It is fine and good to be skeptical of pure computer-based voting, but what's maddening about the Dominion (manufactured) controversy is that those reasonable concerns do not apply here. Let me explain. In 2020 I worked at a polling
60.
by bryananderson 3y ago
> Unfortunately it seems clear that openai trains gptX on common test questions. They still fail novel ones. Maybe in some domains, but it does well with some novel questions. I gave several LLMs a set of false-belief test[0] questions t

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