jmyeet

23 ms·

121.
by jmyeet 3mo ago
Journalist Alfred Henry Lewis said over a century ago that civilization is only 9 meals away from anarchy. I fear in the coming years we are going to be testing that theory. Another quote that springs to mind is "Corporations behave li
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by jmyeet 3mo ago
The Economist is a neoliberal dish rag. There is a completely made up number that is an increasingly large portion of GDP in OECD nations and that number is imputed rent [1]. This is a fictional number that owner-occupiers "pay"
123.
by jmyeet 3mo ago
Google's process produced a price of IIRC $85/share and on first-day trading soared to >$100 so there was a lot of discussion at the time about how efficient that process was. But really that's how all IPOs work, basically
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by jmyeet 3mo ago
I think it's important to understand how we got here and a lot of it has to do with serving network requests or RPCs. The first Web servers used CGI (Common Gateway Interface). This spawned an entire program (process) per request and h
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by jmyeet 3mo ago
Yeah this is just completely wrong. Data centers pay sub-market rates for electricity (as well as getting tax relief, generally). Generally, they use so much electricity that more infrastructure needs to be built. Who pays for that? Not the
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by jmyeet 3mo ago
I'm a firm believer in this as well. You want to enforce a noncompete? Great. You have to pay me as much as what I was earning ( plus benefits ), possibly more, for as long as you want to enforce it. That amount should probably go up 5
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by jmyeet 3mo ago
Private equity is cancer. It honestly should be illegal, particularly to buy a company with a loan and then strip-mine the assets to pay back that loan. Private equity looks for "pricing power". This just means "inelastic dem
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by jmyeet 3mo ago
We're maybe only 2 years away from really useful, relatively affordable local LLM usage. You can buy a 5090 PC for $5-6k but 32GB of VRAM really limits model sizes to ~31B. And that won't change (even with NVidia's next gener
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by jmyeet 3mo ago
I'm not sure that anyone under the age of 45-50 can truly appreciate just how big of a deal Terminator 2 was and how big movie releases can be. Like, nothing in the MCU era or the Star Wars prequels and sequels comes remotely close. Ye
130.
by jmyeet 3mo ago
A lot of people end up commenting on current and potential conflicts clearly knowing nothing about logistics and it shows. I think this whenever I see "China will invade Taiwan". But it also shows up when people don't realize
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by jmyeet 3mo ago
So if the Iran war is still going on in 5 years the global economy has collapsed. I'm not sure people realize just how quickly this situation is going to be dire. 2-3 months more of this and certain countries are going to have rolling
132.
by jmyeet 3mo ago
One of the first gravitational wave detections by LIGO was I think the merger of two black holes or maybe a black hole and a neutron star. It was over a billion light years away I think but was so energetic that it conveted approximately 5
133.
by jmyeet 3mo ago
It's really the plastic straws that are the problem. That and avocado toast. And in 1-2 billion years when the Sun has heated up the Earth such that it's uninhabitable anyway (or 100 years at the rate we're going), we can at
134.
by jmyeet 3mo ago
You're making a different argument. You're saying we need to retain manufacturing capability and expertise. I agree. I'm saying we need to stop being bled dry by private weapons manufacturers on cost plus contracts who are re
135.
by jmyeet 3mo ago
So I looked up the specs and found: - Reapers fly at a "medium" altitude, which is up to about 50,000 feet; - They can fly up to 300mph; - Despite being relatively high up they are relatively slow so lots of country have the milit
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by jmyeet 3mo ago
In his 1961 farewell address, President Eisenhower warned of the dangers of establishing the military-industrial complex [1]. We are seeing the fruits of that now that despite an annual budget over $1T the US has been militarily defeated
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by jmyeet 3mo ago
I would say it's funny but really it's just true. Thunderbolt cables and a lot of other high bandwidth cables have chips in either end, which some people don't realize. And yes, these chips have to handle IO in the gigabit ra
138.
by jmyeet 3mo ago
I don't even know how you learn to do something like this. I was curious about the CPU. I found the specs for the WCH570 [1]. Intel released the 486dx4/100 in1994 (for $650). It's not really the same thing but a 100MHz (kind
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by jmyeet 3mo ago
Whenever I see something like this, I'm always curious how the libertarians rationalize their world view. Because this is what they want: no regulations where companies can do whatever they want. And they will. We're witnessing th
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by jmyeet 3mo ago
One thought I hate reading this is: do you need upward mobility? It's a serious question because in an ideal (IMHO) society, people can have full and satisfying lives with security and family without becoming a CEO. In the US, for ex
141.
by jmyeet 3mo ago
It's fascinating to see the effects of anti-China propaganda. There are plenty of stories about China cracking down on corruptiojn yet people need to do contortions to make this anti-China somehow. There's no evidence that Xi Jinp
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by jmyeet 3mo ago
I firmly believe that we could solve a whole bunch of these problems by making it illegal to advertise to and target minors in online advertising on social media platforms. Remove the incentive and you'll get a lot better behavior. The
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by jmyeet 3mo ago
I think OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX are going to envy the dinosaurs because there's not asteroid coming for them, there's three: 1. There will be no moat around frontier AI models in the future. China is going to make sure that h
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by jmyeet 3mo ago
Over the last 2+ decades gambling has increased massively. By "gambling" I include sports betting, prediction markets, online casinos and crypto (including NFTs). Yes, I'm including crypto under gambling. When ordinary people
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by jmyeet 3mo ago
Follow-up question: who freed the serfs of 19th century Russia? Here's another (not so) fun fact: over a million serfs were freed in 1959 . "Serf" is actually generous because these serfs could be traded like property. You k
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by jmyeet 3mo ago
One of my favorite historical fun facts was that despite the Wright brothers flying the first place in 1903, at the start of WW1, the US was completely incapable of building an airplane and had to buy them from France and Great Britain. Why
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by jmyeet 3mo ago
I guess it's time for some jingoistic rewriting of history. If you want to sum up America's rise to power it's the slave trade, war and a healthy dose of luck (eg the Louisiana Purchase). There is a concerted attempt to rewri
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by jmyeet 3mo ago
I don't think there's a government in the world, including the US, that should allow Palantir anywhere near their data or systems. I consider Palantir a national security threat. I also feel this way about McKinsey (and Bain, BCG,
149.
by jmyeet 3mo ago
This isn't just isn't as clearcut as people make it. A lot of it is based on a historic idea of an SNES cartridge or PS1 disk that contained the complete game, which was played locally and was entirely self-contained. It makes sen
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by jmyeet 3mo ago
Here are two quotes by Karl Marx on landlords: > Landlords do not create value. They merely charge others to use natural resources (like land) that were already there and > Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never

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