mandevil

25 ms·

301.
by mandevil 2y ago
I have two thoughts. A) Retirement creates a better equilibrium, for the economy as a whole. Not just because you flush all the people who have lost a step and yet have enough social/economic power to hide it out of making decisions, b
302.
by mandevil 2y ago
Oh believe me, that's Gould's main point, and the reason that he kept writing these monthly essays for three decades. Looking at, say, Linnaeus attempt to categorize rocks in exactly the same hierarchical way that he was able to s
303.
by mandevil 2y ago
No, stubbornness plus being right are the most valuable trait a scientist can have. A whole lot of scientists were stubbornly wrong and are justifiably forgotten. Stephen J. Gould wrote many of his Natural History magazine essays on these
304.
by mandevil 2y ago
Into the 1970's, NASA did that. That was why there was Viking 1 and 2, Voyager 1 and 2, Pioneer 10 and 11, etc. Since then, however, NASA has stopped doing that. It became a balancing act- yes, 0 to 1 is much more expensive than 1 to
305.
by mandevil 2y ago
Crop failures are natural disasters. Famine's are political disasters. The Indian economist Amartya Sen wrote a book in 1999, _Development as Freedom_ which argues, relatively convincingly, that famine's don't happen in funct
306.
by mandevil 2y ago
I sincerely wonder how long that will be true. Google was amazing and didn't have more than small, easily ignorable ads in 1999, and they weren't really tracking you the way they are today, just an all-around better experience tha
307.
by mandevil 2y ago
"Hoping that technology can magically solve this without destroying privacy" seems to be where the Supreme Court is heading, at least that was what observers thought after watching the Court's hearing on the Texas bill a few
308.
by mandevil 2y ago
This is about a Texas Law that went before the Supreme Court recently. Texas' law, H.B. 1181, requires people visiting porn websites to prove their age by either uploading government-issued identification or a "commercially reason
309.
by mandevil 2y ago
For you and me, not a problem. My wife is a medical professional and would have no clue what to do with a TGZ file. Also, the fact that they don't mention this difference- the UI is so poorly done that you can only tell that TGZ can go
310.
by mandevil 2y ago
Only on TGZ files, not zip, which maxes out at 4GB. (This is not because of a file size limitation. The only way to get 4GB is through zip64, which has a file size limit measured in exabytes.)
311.
by mandevil 2y ago
When I did this recently the max zip was 4GB- and that was only from doing zip64, regular old zip was 2GB limit. TGZ could do up to 50GB. But these limits are weird because while file size limits do exist, they don't match Google'
312.
by mandevil 2y ago
Atmospheric drag on satellites- especially how it changes with solar output levels- is a hard thing to model accurately, and a major contributor to orbital uncertainty here on Earth. The Martian atmosphere is two orders of magnitude thinner
313.
by mandevil 2y ago
The issues would be A) that Mars upper atmosphere and internal mass distribution are not as well mapped as on Earth, so knowing your orbital accuracy is much more difficult (1)- and at 8km/s small orbital error bars become giant error
314.
by mandevil 2y ago
GPS has always had to account for relativistic time dilation, it's the first human scale issue where relativistic correction became necessary. (This would be general relativity, incidentally, not special: it's the effect of the Ea
315.
by mandevil 2y ago
That plan is a massive government subsidy in exactly the same way. It's just that instead of direct payments, the subsidy is forcing the government to pay more for all its AI chip needs, because it is deliberately limiting the competit
316.
by mandevil 2y ago
ChatGPT had its initial public release November 30th, 2022. That's 820 days to today. The Apple II was first sold June 10, 1977, and Visicalc was first sold October 17, 1979, which is 859 days. So we're right about the same distan
317.
by mandevil 2y ago
What ended the XB-70 was SAM's, not ICBM's so much. It was much easier for the Soviets to build and deploy the SA-5 Gammon (aka the S-200 Angara, basically a perfect a B-70 killer) than it would be to build and operate a significa
318.
by mandevil 2y ago
The actually built XB-70's- the two prototypes- did not have a refueling receptacle. Production models would have had a boom receptacle just like the B-47, B-52 and B-58 did. It would have gone in the upper fuselage about where the del
319.
by mandevil 2y ago
My favorite bit of design from this era went something like this: "ooohhh, we need something that can handle high heat. How about if we made it radioactive?" and so Mag-Thor was born ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki&
320.
by mandevil 2y ago
The National Science Foundation funded the original research that became Google: https://www.nsf.gov/news/origins-google That grant in the area of library science led directly to one of the most valuable companies on
321.
by mandevil 2y ago
I mean, to be fair, "knowing all of the relevant literature" is a great first step for solving a problem! And a LLM can probably be better about not forgetting than humans are (though I'm guessing they do much worse on the ha
322.
by mandevil 2y ago
I agree that Augustulus and Ordacer mattered to almost no one by 476, which is why it happened the way it did. However, the point I was trying to make is that Rome's decline sure lasted a very long time indeed. Additionally, 235 being
323.
by mandevil 2y ago
235 CE Rome? The Western Roman Empire lasts another two centuries- Romulus Augustus is deposed in 476 CE. That's longer than the US Constitution has existed (ratified in 1788).
324.
by mandevil 2y ago
Charles Lindbergh was good enough- and lucky enough- to be the first person to fly New York to Paris and became the most famous man in the world when he won the Orteig Prize. Six other people weren't quite good or lucky enough, and die
325.
by mandevil 2y ago
You are out of date. North Korea currently deploys enough warheads to exhaust the current GMD system. The problem is that adding another warhead (MRV or MIRV) is much much cheaper than building a whole new interceptor (and adding a decoy is
326.
by mandevil 2y ago
Errr, I think the market has priced in an awful lot of corruption. PLTR closed at $41.41 on November 4th (day before election), and after its 10% drop today, it closed at $112.06. The market might be saying that even with the corruption, if
327.
by mandevil 2y ago
Give OpenAI 25 years and they're going to be throwing up plenty of ads in our faces. Source: I remember using Google in 1999. Momento mori to anything raising tens of billions of dollars from VCs and PE's. The UX is going to get m
328.
by mandevil 2y ago
Right now no amendment can pass at all. You can look at when amendments pass, and most of the time they come in bunches, when either the parties are unusually close together or one party or the other is unusually powerful. Right now- with a
329.
by mandevil 2y ago
The reason civil service protections exist is that when managers could fire everyone, and managers were chosen based on being the friend of the guy who just won the election, it lead to massive corruption and ineffective and hollowed out bu
330.
by mandevil 2y ago
How do you measure productivity, better than "I know it when I see it"? Software development is one of the best studied areas for what productivity is, and the thing that everyone agrees is that there are no good metrics for it. F

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