mandevil

33 ms·

391.
by mandevil 2y ago
I've really been fascinated with how explicitly people set out to build nations in the 19th Century. I read Christopher Krebs' _A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich_ and it traces
392.
by mandevil 2y ago
https://transtats.bts.gov/Data_Elements_Financial.aspx shows 2001-2005 net income losses were 57 billion dollars, then a brief profitability in 2006-7 but the losses of 2008 and 2009 wiped that all out again (in net income
393.
by mandevil 2y ago
During the post-2001 crash in airline passenger demand US airlines lost more money in that one slump than all profits from all US airlines, combined, from the Wright Brothers to September 11th 2001. That was why you had such rapid consolida
394.
by mandevil 2y ago
Cell phone tracking is better at surveillance than the best stuff the military has. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/02/22/... has a fun story about a time at Fort Irwin (US Army las
395.
by mandevil 2y ago
I remember doing the math once years ago and if you presume that all of the asteroids are pure Fe, you have on the order of 100 atoms/m^3 of density in the "asteroid belt."
396.
by mandevil 2y ago
That may be true for Bezos himself- but do you think that respect and affirmation will trickle down to the Washington Post and net them new subscribers? I'm extremely skeptical. This is not the first time someone has tried this pivot,
397.
by mandevil 2y ago
The false story of the frog in the pot applies here: if you want to make a change like that it has to be slow and steady, at an imperceptible pace. Doing something big and obvious destroys your pivot. You've lost trust with your existi
398.
by mandevil 2y ago
s/smart people/computer programmers/g I mean, that was his entire point about crypto- how it speed-ran the entire history of finance markets and discovered- in very painful and usually expensive ways- why each bit of market r
399.
by mandevil 2y ago
The same article notes that the newspaper itself and also the people who resigned from the paper over this say it has nothing to do with Gaza and his daughter was involved in none of the conversations about this. My best guess is that she t
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by mandevil 2y ago
Right. If this decision had been made and announced two years ago, no one cares. But according to published reports, the Editorial Board actually wrote up an endorsement and then the owner decided to spike it at the last minute- that's
401.
by mandevil 2y ago
You're talking about Dennis Muilenberg, who was the CEO during the 737 Max accidents and failed to properly investigate it (he was CEO from 2015-2019). But he came from the Boeing Defense side, and had no influence on the civil aviatio
402.
by mandevil 2y ago
I didn't think the 9 inches added to the gears on the telescoping mechanism were enough to fit the LEAP or the PW1000, I thought that they needed more clearance than that.
403.
by mandevil 2y ago
Boeing actually pitched a "787, but 737 sized" to airlines, who all said "No, what we really want is a plane with a 737 Type Certificate (so all of our pilots don't need expensive training) that matches the fuel efficien
404.
by mandevil 2y ago
Counterpoint: the biggest problem facing opinion journalism today is the competition. Actual news reporting is expensive and slow and sometimes doesn't pan out, isn't very profitable and there isn't that much of it. But you c
405.
by mandevil 2y ago
I am monolingual but here is Le Monde's English edition endorsing an anti-RN (far right party) plan in the recent French Parliamentary elections: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2024/06&#x2
406.
by mandevil 2y ago
As long as the Post has an editorial page, with people employed to share their opinions, what are they supposed to do? Opinion and reporting are separate- famously the WSJ reporting is quite strong and their opinion section is ... often wro
407.
by mandevil 2y ago
Well, on the details, technically creationism is non-falsifiable, because God in his infinite wisdom could have just done whatever (1). It's impossible to disprove it- that's why its not part of science. But the issue of whether s
408.
by mandevil 2y ago
I am biased against creationism being treated as science. And that is correct, because one side is true and the other is false and should not be taught or treated equally. So I think either your definition is wrong or your goal of neutralit
409.
by mandevil 2y ago
It never made it into science class, but only because institutions had (and have) the power to set rules and not be neutral on important issues of the day. It was our choice at the museum that received tax payer funding to not be neutral th
410.
by mandevil 2y ago
You are ignoring my point. I was a volunteer at a US science museum that received some taxpayer funding back in the mid-aughts when "Scientific Creationism" was still a thing. Our museum had (and still has) an institutional commit
411.
by mandevil 2y ago
"What is truth?" asked the powerful Roman governor of Judea, of a man accused of blasphemy two millennia ago, and we still don't know. What is "neutrality" for a university? Is creationism "neutral"? It wa
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by mandevil 2y ago
If all Bezos cared about was having lower taxes for billionaires he could have simply hired a bunch of people who believed in that and had them be the editorial board, and they would endorse whomever he wanted. The fact that he had the edit
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by mandevil 2y ago
This is extremely similar to the sudden announcement of policies by all the major newspapers that they were not going to publish documents that they thought were stolen by foriegn intelligence services from political campaigns: it is a reas
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by mandevil 2y ago
Right, no one is buying the digital scans. But tons of people buy physical replicas- I have been a volunteer at a different museum and our physical models of our most famous artifacts were very nice money makers for us, so I presume they wo
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by mandevil 2y ago
It would be hard for, to pick a random large company like Coca-Cola, to hire a whole bunch of top school CS grads. Their IT team will always be less attractive as a job than working at a company whose whole focus is IT, and so giving the ch
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by mandevil 2y ago
Retrieval Augmented Generation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrieval-augmented_generation Basically, using your actual data/documents to supplement a general purpose LLM and generate better answers for your spe
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by mandevil 2y ago
I was using multiple here to mean 3 or more launches, because otherwise the Gemini missions that docked to a separately launched Agena-D booster (G8, G10, G11, G12) would all qualify: GX and GXI even restarted the ATV's engine to set n
418.
by mandevil 2y ago
Right now, I think only three things have been assembled from multiple launches like you are proposing: Mir, ISS, and Tiangong. All of which were super expensive and the result of years of careful design work. Definitely not the way to make
419.
by mandevil 2y ago
Errr, I am saying that Elon's claims are obviously BS until we start to see Tesla doing something like what Waymo has had for years(1): a team of people ready to intervene and fix things that are outside the training set of the ML. I h
420.
by mandevil 2y ago
I mean, you definitely need people available to intervene even for a L4 or L5 autonomy, because they will get stuck (Tesla is not serious about robotaxis until they start staffing up a team to do that on a full-time basis). But actual drivi

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