mapt

13 ms·

211.
by mapt 8mo ago
This is a private transaction, for the profit of the banks providing the money to perform the buyout. The banks are betting that the company/brand, once stripped of any valuable assets and being stretched to painful profitability at th
212.
by mapt 8mo ago
This system sounds like one of the many pieces of science equipment whose costs are >98% in one-off R&D engineering & mission ops, and <2% in marginal cost of construction/launch. Imagine a hundred of these exploring Mars
213.
by mapt 8mo ago
My "Random Singles" Youtube playlist created in 2006 is approaching 1500 tracks. ~200 of them are hidden, because the video is no longer available. It's not that I can't find other copies (although in some cases I liter
214.
by mapt 8mo ago
Mostly length regulation, and the prevalence of "sleeper" cabs and other trip length related factors. Economies are a little more self contained and less overland-transcontinental in Europe as well - the amount of freight going R
215.
by mapt 8mo ago
Part of the issue is the extreme constraints imposed on designers by road regulation, another is simply that the majority (75%?) of drag reduction is in a fishtail that needs to go on the container, the part of the truck that gets left behi
216.
by mapt 8mo ago
Studies of the 20th century manufacturing learning rate suggests that creation of arbitrary goods drops on the order of 15-20% every time you double production volume. This is before general purpose robotics and AI! Just interchangeable to
217.
by mapt 8mo ago
We don't even get that far in the US. It has been largely verboten in "nonpartisan" life, either socially or by dint of an active purge in eg academia and Hollywood, to discuss anything beneficial coming out of Soviet, Chine
218.
by mapt 8mo ago
All of those can be mooted by the sort of dysfunction currently on offer. Almost every bill for the past 15 years has been filibustered. More than half the Supreme Court is part of an organized partisan conspiracy, and a third has worked s
219.
by mapt 8mo ago
COVID dropped US life expectancy by about 2 years. The Fall dropped Russian life expectancy by six years for males and three years for females.
220.
by mapt 8mo ago
First, take a look at a process node that is 20 years out of date, considered almost trivial by comparison to today's chips. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUgy29h0alM
221.
by mapt 8mo ago
There's no government as effective at instituting necessary changes as a benevolent autocracy, nor any so effective at destruction as a malevolent one. If our democracy is sufficiently broken, if supermajority voter policy preferences
222.
by mapt 8mo ago
Your sentence seems to imply that we will delegate all AI decisions to one person who can decide how he wants to use it - to build or destroy. Strong agentic AIs are a death sentence memo pad (or a malevolent djinn lamp if you like) that an
223.
by mapt 8mo ago
Investors love a monopoly, and establishing this required more than a trillion dollars of investment sustained over a couple decades.
224.
by mapt 8mo ago
No it isn't. If you get the MRI you are performing simultaneous blind tests for a thousand rare, unsuspected conditions. The blood test only tests for one of them, and eats 10ml of blood. There isn't enough blood in your body fo
225.
by mapt 8mo ago
The heuristic isn't going away because we have limited time. Let's say you can clock AI in the first paragraph. There are lots of places like Linkedin where people write slop articles saying basically nothing insightful, and AI a
226.
by mapt 8mo ago
I don't care as much about the combat as about the efficiency. That's a big wing airfoil, and it's cheap foam, and it's not as mechanically complex as a helicopter. There is potential here for low-speed heavy lift. I w
227.
by mapt 8mo ago
It was a benevolent AI takeover. It just required some robo-motorcycles with scythe blades to deal with obstacles. Like the AI in "Friendship is Optimal", which aims to (and this was very carefully considered) 'Satisfy hum
228.
by mapt 8mo ago
And E2EE platforms like Mega are now being censored on some platforms specifically because they're E2EE, and so the name itself must be treated as CSAM. As people who want to talk about words like "megabytes" or "megapix
229.
by mapt 8mo ago
The prospect of "Attack" and "Literal War" is limited by the fact that worst-case resistance involves a drone strike, and worst-case compliance involves retaining enough wealth for you and everyone you know to live on th
230.
by mapt 8mo ago
They're not standing still now. They're eating our entrails. Right now. We haven't passed a budget in almost 30 years, we've been routinely filibustering nearly all legislation for 15 (breaking the gameplay loop for el
231.
by mapt 8mo ago
I don't really want to cut taxes for the working/middle class though. I want to tax the everliving fuck out of the hyper-wealthy, to the point that they cease to exist. The money should go into providing goods and services for t
232.
by mapt 8mo ago
Also utility plenums. Or other things. Literally available retail at Home Depot up to 36" for a dollar a tie. We use them to hold temporary fencing together.
233.
by mapt 8mo ago
All of the regulations that are used to "limit sprawl" in the US functionally prohibit the construction of new dense city blocks even moreso, and this in turn forces suburban sprawl to occur.
234.
by mapt 8mo ago
The cowling of the current turbines serves the same purpose, but needs to cover 360 degrees of rotation, so it's heavier and draggier. The blades have a bit more angular momentum in the propfan than in a high bypass turbofan, but ther
235.
by mapt 8mo ago
The US occasionally has mayors & governors who spitefully or corruptly trap their successors contractually in long-term commitments with private parties which are obviously bad financial decisions. I argue that we have a reasonableness
236.
by mapt 8mo ago
Rastafarian hijackers are rampant.
237.
by mapt 8mo ago
A growing part of me doesn't care, and doesn't want to coddle fascist mental illness. If it was "Glass Iraq or make people take off their shoes", then I'll take the shoes... But honestly? Fuck these people. We hav
238.
by mapt 8mo ago
Debt/war/penal/chattel slavery was not a particularly strong economic activity in Europe in the Middle Ages. What we're mostly talking about is agricultural serfdom. I think the Church had a lot less to do with the end
239.
by mapt 8mo ago
Their shareholders did not want them to add long term value to the company. Their shareholders wanted AI.
240.
by mapt 8mo ago
It is a very vague multifaceted concept. "EU sovereignty" in this context means being the EU being able to act with comparable agency to the US or China, as a world power. Italy or Belgium is never going to be a world power again

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