jltsiren

18 ms·

301.
by jltsiren 8mo ago
> If you have enough density to justify a bus lane, you have enough density to justify a subway. That assumes a linear city, where everyone lives within a short walking distance of the same street. In actual cities, bus lines from differ
302.
by jltsiren 8mo ago
EDIT: Anthropic should not be allowed to favor its own clients with lower prices.
303.
by jltsiren 8mo ago
This is not a technical question. The immediate pro-market position is that if third-party clients are allowed / possible, Anthropic should be allowed to favor its own clients with lower prices. But the position can go further if the s
304.
by jltsiren 8mo ago
That's a result of the funding model focused on small competitive grants. You could probably get at least as good research with a funding model that replaces every three PhD students with a student and a staff scientist. But then the s
305.
by jltsiren 8mo ago
It's basically the difference between pro-market capitalism and pro-business capitalism. The value to the society comes from competition in the market and from the businesses' ability to choose freely how they do business. When th
306.
by jltsiren 8mo ago
I don't think doubling the support would have been nearly enough to ensure Ukrainian victory. The fundamental issue is that Russia has not fully committed to winning the war either. While losing the war would be an existential threat t
307.
by jltsiren 8mo ago
Individuals saving for retirement must deal with the risk that they live to an old age and their savings must last for decades. Pension plans have a higher safe withdrawal rate, because people on the average have average lifespans. When a p
308.
by jltsiren 8mo ago
Until recently, philosophy of artificial intelligence seemed to be mostly about arguments why the Turing test was not a useful benchmark for intelligence. Pretty much everyone who had ever thought about the problem seriously had come to the
309.
by jltsiren 8mo ago
Europe was technologically advanced but lacked in state capacity. The Aztecs and the Maya were the opposite. Sanitation is a literal stone age technology, originally developed by societies we have very little evidence of. It doesn't re
310.
by jltsiren 8mo ago
Perhaps we are talking about two different concepts called "gift economy". The gift economy concept I'm familiar with has been used to describe various non-state polities, where people exchange gifts to maintain relationships
311.
by jltsiren 8mo ago
A gift economy only exists between people who agree that they are participating in one. Gifts between equals create expectations of reciprocity. If you use open source software, you are expected to contribute. Accepting a gift without an in
312.
by jltsiren 9mo ago
It's misleading because it focuses on actions that are clearly not working. People on the average are increasing their consumption, not reducing it. That means the actual problem — the waste at the end of the pipeline — is growing ever
313.
by jltsiren 9mo ago
I find the "reduce, reuse, recycle" slogan misleading. Everything that is manufactured will eventually become waste that must be disposed of responsibly. The overall volume of manufacturing only goes up if we leave it to the marke
314.
by jltsiren 9mo ago
It's more like two business days in the academia, and only if a simple response is enough. Complex questions often take longer, because coming up with an answer may take an hour or two of uninterrupted time. And if it's a cold ema
315.
by jltsiren 9mo ago
You are missing the point. This was about households rather than individuals and housing units instead of homes, and privacy is unrelated to the discussion. For example, longhouses typically had internal subdivisions that functioned as hous
316.
by jltsiren 9mo ago
"Living wage" means what a household needs for a dignified life, not just for bare subsistence. If you need roommates because you can't afford an apartment on your own, you are poor by definition. That's probably the mos
317.
by jltsiren 9mo ago
Intelligence is a vague concept anyway. One way to look at this is that "fluid intelligence" represents potential intelligence or raw processing power. "Crystallized intelligence" and "emotional intelligence" a
318.
by jltsiren 9mo ago
I think it's the opposite. People remember how Bill Gates got rich. They remember that the damage he caused mostly affected capitalists and professionals in developed countries. His businesses mostly didn't abuse labor in developi
319.
by jltsiren 9mo ago
You can blame the Romans for that, as they practiced inclusive counting. Their market days occurring once every 8 days were called nundinae, because the next market day was the ninth day from the previous one. (And by the same logic, Jesus
320.
by jltsiren 9mo ago
When precision is required, you either use kibibytes or define your kilobytes explicitly. Otherwise there is a real risk that the other party does not share your understanding of what a kilobyte should mean in that context. Then the numbers
321.
by jltsiren 9mo ago
From my perspective, the problem with Java's approach is memory, not computation. For example, low-level languages treat types as convenient lies you can choose to ignore at your own peril. If it's more convenient to treat your ob
322.
by jltsiren 9mo ago
Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves. (Similarly, Islamic Europe had banned Muslim slaves.) As Christianity spread, slaves were n
323.
by jltsiren 9mo ago
> The question is can you match Java's performance without significantly increasing the cost of development and especially evolution in a way that makes the tradeoff worthwhile? This question is mostly about the person and their way
324.
by jltsiren 9mo ago
In my experience, if your C++ or Rust code does not perform as well as Java, it's probably because you are trying to write Java in C++ or Rust. Java can handle a large number of small heap-allocated objects shared between threads reall
325.
by jltsiren 9mo ago
Or it makes gatekeepers even more important than before. Every submission to a journal will be desk-rejected, unless it is vouched for by someone one of the editors trusts. And people won't even look at a new paper, unless it's vo
326.
by jltsiren 9mo ago
The fundamental question is whether the primary unit of the society is a household or an individual. If you assume that the society consists of individuals, people should be taxed individually, spouses should be allowed to choose in advance
327.
by jltsiren 9mo ago
Those "decent salaries" have caused a lot of trouble in the US. They are probably not that good for the society, even if they attract foreign talent. There is not much difference in labor share of GDP between the US and the EU. Pe
328.
by jltsiren 9mo ago
That's a misunderstanding. There were plenty of ancient and medieval translations of the Bible, but the Bible itself wasn't as central as it is today. Catholic and Orthodox Christianity do not focus as much on the Bible as Protest
329.
by jltsiren 9mo ago
Aerial bombardments typically target areas with ~0.01 people/square meter, and those people are often in hardened shelters. A protest may have 1–4 people/square meter out in the open. Attacks targeting the latter cause orders of m
330.
by jltsiren 9mo ago
Frodo is determined and reasonably competent, but he ultimately fails his quest. In the end, Frodo is not strong enough to let the Ring go, but he instead claims it as his own. Middle-earth is only saved, because Frodo decided to spare Goll

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