svara

32 ms·

421.
by svara 3y ago
My argument was in some sense more shallow, I just made a point about how we talk about things. You can open a map and find that a river has a name, that's true no matter your stance on what it "really is".
422.
by svara 3y ago
We do speak of dynamic phenomena as "existing" all the time. A river is made up of different water molecules every day, yet it's the same river over millennia. In the same way, countries (and other abstract entities such as c
423.
by svara 3y ago
How do you get the x scaling right? You have to measure the speed of the train somehow?
424.
by svara 4y ago
It probably depends on the person. There are controversial debates on this topic all the time on r/learnjapanese. In my experience, stopping writing practice has made me progress faster with Japanese, since I can now use the time for o
425.
by svara 4y ago
Informative here meaning that you can deduce something about a plant's condition from faint sounds emitted by it. It's not implying that the plants use those sounds for the purpose of transmitting information. From the article: &q
426.
by svara 4y ago
I found it fascinating to read those two books back-to-back. Really explained a lot to me about the mindset of people at the time. Importantly, he was an officer, while Remarque describes the experience of a "small man".
427.
by svara 4y ago
If we replace a big chunk of our media with derivative works created by copyright laundering engines, we're destroying the incentives to be original and creative. But we absolutely need originality and creativity! Living in a world whe
428.
by svara 4y ago
Don't think of this in terms of just art. In fact art is probably a confusing example since the creative process is a bit obscure. Think of creating any immaterial object of value to you or others. A recipe book, a coding blog, a graph
429.
by svara 4y ago
That's purely an optimization, though. Meaning, it would look just like this if it really was "GoL all the way down".
430.
by svara 4y ago
It's a vaccine because it doesn't work on the cancer directly but rather teaches your immune system to attack the cancer.
431.
by svara 4y ago
The moral of the story is that laziness is a virtue. Think of all the time that could have been saved, had you had no plans like your partners ;)
432.
by svara 4y ago
> Friedberg, who served as FTX’s general counsel before taking on the company’s regulatory role, was recently described by Coingeek’s Steven Stradbrooke as being “almost comically inappropriate” for the job. The description appears apt,
433.
by svara 4y ago
It's not Nature, it's Scientific Reports. The bar to publication in the two couldn't be more different. Nature is one of the premier high impact journals, Sci. Rep. is a pretty middle of the road somewhat new open access jour
434.
by svara 4y ago
How would you get to CO2 neutrality if degrowth is going to be the strategy? If you go back to the world of 50 years ago, you reduce emissions but you don't solve the problem, and you make it impossible to go to an entirely carbon neut
435.
by svara 4y ago
> You're either going to recognize that you're falling asleep, and pull off the road to rest, or recognize that you're falling asleep and decide to power through You can totally start falling asleep without noticing, becau
436.
by svara 4y ago
Maybe some people think that, but sometimes people are deluded or simply are investing based on the greater fool theory. The latter reason means that even the market as a whole might not actually believe in the current market cap, in the lo
437.
by svara 4y ago
Uh, so, HN predicted the pandemic? :) Curious what's going on there.
438.
by svara 5y ago
You're making it too simple for yourself with that label. I'm not a crypto hater. I am a disillusioned early adopter. The Satoshi paper blew my mind and I still have my letter from the Japanese court liquidating Mt. Gox's ass
439.
by svara 5y ago
This is not a debate that has to be had in the abstract anymore. It's been more than 10 years. Where's the cool stuff that those supposed technology breakthroughs enabled? I think we all know what the proponents would point to. Ar
440.
by svara 5y ago
I used to do Cologne-Munich _all_the_effing_time (~600km, door-to-door 6-7h, depending on connection). You can save about 1h by taking a flight, but then you'll never have a solid chunk of at least one 1h to do anything within. And tha
441.
by svara 5y ago
You're right looking back, but this might just be the turning point. The German chancellor just announced an increase of military spending to exceed 2% of annual GDP, as requested by NATO allies for a very long time; to supply weapons
442.
by svara 5y ago
The science system isn't perfect, scientists are just people, and if you start out with an overly naive view of what the science system is like (as I once did!) you might get disappointed. Still, you're take is wildly, overly cyni
443.
by svara 5y ago
I've experienced the same thing, but always had to wonder: maybe you're on an underlying trajectory of improvement fueled by practice, which is not influenced by brief breaks. However, after a break, you notice all the improvement
444.
by svara 5y ago
Maybe so, but at least mining is actually necessary to get gold out of the ground. Whereas running a distributed database and gambling can both be had for much less.
445.
by svara 5y ago
I'm making a different argument. We may not like ads, but all sorts of real things happen in the world in order to make ads, and as a consequence of ads. The ad industry is not on a trajectory to turn every last grain of sand into an a
446.
by svara 5y ago
Unfortunately, that won't work. Bitcoin is designed so that material/energy approximately equal in value to mining revenue is wasted. What you waste it on is ultimately irrelevant.
447.
by svara 5y ago
PoW mining (at least), must be made illegal. I have no doubts that it will end by becoming illegal, the question is how and when. It boggles the mind that there is now essentially a worldwide tax on semiconductors, which is used to do... no
448.
by svara 5y ago
I don't see the direct link between energy prices and PoW mining. At least not beyond the theoretical supply and demand argument, and PoW mining energy demand is still relatively small. Care to elaborate?
449.
by svara 5y ago
A game theoretically designed paperclip maximizer is growing so large that we're starting to see collateral damage in the broad economy; car prices and availability issues, just to name one example.
450.
by svara 5y ago
That's fair, yes. High exponential growth rates make the system much harder to control though, and will easily overshoot the 'set point' (maximal hospital capacity). At a 2-3 day doubling time that overshoot could look pretty

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