mjhay

8 ms·

121.
by mjhay 2y ago
No argument from me. Trees work. Stopping forest loss is an absolutely low-hanging fruit, but one that we still cannot achieve. Rewilding of massive areas must be a primary goal. If we can't do that, we certainly can't do DAC. In
122.
by mjhay 2y ago
I'm glad more renewables are coming online, but that's not the 24/7 base capacity that is really needed to fully replace fossil fuels. Solar and wind are cheap now, but they only generate power when the sun is shining or the
123.
by mjhay 2y ago
Direct air capture is really about the least realistic of popular geoengineering proposals. The atmosphere is huge. We didn't get into this situation overnight - it took almost two centuries and oodles of factories, vehicles, concrete
124.
by mjhay 2y ago
Yeah, it didn't used to be that big of a divide. Nowadays it seems like analytic philosophers are doing endless retreads, and continental ones are also doing endless retreads, but with more confusing sentence structure. From a 10,000 f
125.
by mjhay 2y ago
Forgive me for being cynical at this point, but I'll believe it when it comes online. I sure hope they're successful, though. Nuclear is still the only thing we have going for relatively near-term non fossil-fuel baseload. Anythin
126.
by mjhay 2y ago
You may be interested in some of the work of the great Bill Lawvere, especially around formalization of Hegelian dialectics: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/William+Lawvere#RelationToPhil...
127.
by mjhay 2y ago
There's been a decent amount of work using simplicial complexes and related ideas to generalize graph neural networks, e.g. [0], [1]. If LLMs obey a similar geometry, it could be a promising direction for multimodal models and more pri
128.
by mjhay 2y ago
She might like Adventure Time (which is also very entertaining for adults). One of the main characters is Princess Bubblegum, a very competant scientist-princess (albeit with some megalomaniacal tendencies).
129.
by mjhay 2y ago
There was actually an NFT startup a while back that called itself "Nonce Finance." They wound up rebranding.
130.
by mjhay 2y ago
'Alignment' looks to be the hot new buzzword of summer 2024.
131.
by mjhay 2y ago
I urge executives to stop losing their minds with the FOMO need to insert "AI" into everything.
132.
by mjhay 2y ago
Amazon's profit margins on data transfer are out of this world, like probably > 80%. Data transfer costs are hard and confusing to predict (especially with different regions, etc), so it makes sense they'd gouge on it more than
133.
by mjhay 2y ago
The justice system and workplace discipline are two entirely different things. This false equivalence is similar to how people say getting banned on Reddit for posting racist stuff violates their 1st Amendment rights.
134.
by mjhay 2y ago
They should probably workshop that name a bit more.
135.
by mjhay 2y ago
The Romans didn't really have that much of a tech advantage vs. steppe riders like the Huns when it came to practical combat. They also had good horsemanship (learning to ride as toddlers) and the valuable ability to fire arrows from h
136.
by mjhay 2y ago
The poetry equivalent would be renv. R is a highly functional language modeled after Scheme. In many ways it's more powerful than python, especially due to its metaprogramming capabilities. It's possible to write maintainable, rea
137.
by mjhay 2y ago
It incentives holding cash and letting it sit, not putting it into productive investments. Deflation was a big part of Japan's economic woes for years. It's hard to climb out of.
138.
by mjhay 2y ago
I remember a quote saying something to the effect of "the Roman Empire wasn't murdered, it killed itself on accident."
139.
by mjhay 2y ago
There were vastly more slaves in the late Republic and early Empire than the mid or late empire, due to conquest. Slaves undercutting free workers was a factor in the fall of the Republic, but it had little to do with the fall of the Empire
140.
by mjhay 2y ago
As a corollary to 2), a reduction in inflation does not return prices back to previous levels. That's a misconception I see all the time. Negative inflation, or deflation, can reduce prices of course, but you really, really don't
141.
by mjhay 2y ago
A simultaneous failure of multiple breadbasket regions (something made much more likely by climate change) would case mass global death. To be fair, first-worlders wouldn't be as affected, though. It's not good to assume all hope
142.
by mjhay 2y ago
In other news, 63% of Americans should stop watching so many sci-fi movies.
143.
by mjhay 2y ago
Time to polish up their LinkedIn profiles
144.
by mjhay 2y ago
Are people in the UK no longer panicking about "small boats" anymore? I guess ebikes make sense for a new anxiety focus, given that they are smaller than most other other motorized land transport.
145.
by mjhay 2y ago
There's no exponential growth, that's thermodynamically impossible. Heating the Earth with the microwaves would increase the Earth's radiation into space commensurately. It doesn't get stored forever. This would result i
146.
by mjhay 2y ago
High-power lasers don't work over long distances in the atmosphere due to blooming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_blooming
147.
by mjhay 2y ago
The Earth is in radiative balance with space on all but very short timescales. The extra heat, even if it were enough to matter, dissipates quickly.
148.
by mjhay 2y ago
cwm is very nice and usable. I used it for a long time before I switched to Mac (for the hardware, not software).
149.
by mjhay 2y ago
I'm really looking forward to the Trough-of-Dissillutionment phase of LLM's hype cycle. This insistence of shoehorning it into everything is getting beyond stupid.
150.
by mjhay 2y ago
The fume hood/microwave above the stove combos that seem to be standard now are terrible. They vent poorly and clog quickly. The microwave internals don't leave enough room for a wide vent, and the ventilation is shared by the mic

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