ANewFormation

That 50% was after years of bubble optimism and actively blinding themselves to data strongly suggestive otherwise.

Had the Apollo missions failed you would obviously be arguing, using the exact same data, that they 'knew they never had a chance.'

The ISS's orbit is not particularly stable and it needs regular reboosts which leaves everything else scheduled with this in mind.

Providing food and other necessary resources for a long stay would not be especially difficult, but there's no need for it, and that leaves more volume to store other stuff.

The ISS, despite being a 'station', is very small with a pressurized volume of about 900m^3, about 100m^3 less than Starship. The linked capsule design also means the real usable volume is substantially less.

It's not just about doing something better but about the balance between the pros and the cons. The problem with LLMs are hallucinations. If cars just somehow made you drive the wrong way with the frequency that LLMs send one down the wrong path with compelling sounding nonsense, then I suspect we'd still be riding horses nowadays.

The fundamental problem is that we keep setting 'reasonable' benchmarks, implicitly because we want to make them seem reachable, but then when we inevitably do we find it feels we [of course] haven't achieved what we really wanted to in the first place.

True artificial intelligence would have the ability to meaningfully and significantly improve itself, recursively - a characteristic of even the most primitive life on Earth.

And the implications of a computing system capable of such simply can't be overstated. With access to essentially all contemporary knowledge, flawless recall, and stupidly ridiculous amounts of energy to power itself (relative to e.g. a brain), it would create an explosion of knowledge in every single domain imaginable, and many we can't even yet fathom. And it would be doing this at an accelerating pace owing to self improvement.

Basically the very nature of existence and knowledge would change. Sentience or not would be irrelevant as we simply tried (and inevitably failed, miserably) to catch up.

But this is a bit further out of reach than 'can vaguely pass for a human in a casual non-adversarial q&a style chat.'

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This was one of the rather many areas where Star Trek failed to really consider the implications of its concepts, probably because it would simply break the world building. The Borg, for instance, would be defacto Gods in no time, even without assimilation.

All you're talking about there in the end would be another compilation step.

I'm highly bearish on the concept of anything like that ever being possible (and near perfectly reliable) with llms, but if it were then it'd make sense as just another processing phase in compilation.

This is not the sort of topic where that happens. Everybody is aware that if you spin the data this way or that on these sort of topics (broadly - social science with strong preformed views that tends to directly apply to oneself) that you can prove whatever you want, and all a plurality one way or the other demonstrates is the trending bias among those publishing in such a field.

When people do change their minds on such topics it tends to be from lived wisdom rather than learned knowledge. Or starting to see such things through the perspective of your children, rather than yourself.

There's no trust or belief - you're just trading one scarce in demand resource due another scarce in demand resource - nothing more and nothing less.

This is the reason your money becomes worth less when we print more. A vendor selling whatever will want even more because his product is just as scarce as it was before, but what you're trading for it has become less scarce, and so has less value.

And taken to extremes this value can approach 0 quite rapidly. Trust, belief and all these things don't matter if you're trying to trade me something I see as less valuable than what you want in exchange for it.

You're referring to the normal and reasonable view, but I think most are targeting this weird new(ish) concept, heavily intertwined into politics, that any and all differences between groups are due to biases or other environmental factors.

So if you see that e.g. one group is lagging behind in math then that is taken at face value as evidence that 'math is racist.' A search for that exact phrase will turn up a million hits, pushed by some very big entities, if you want to go down this rabbit hole.

But if you don't already know about this stuff - just don't. The amount of stupidity and transparent divide+conquer politics in it all is just nauseating.

On the other hand it does have contemporary relevance as a lot of the funding for this stuff is being scrapped, and it's nice to understand what we're 'losing.'

Money has a perception of value because of scarcity + demand. The government could, in theory, 'print' enough money to make every single American a trillionaire tomorrow.

Of course all that would do is make the dollar worthless and completely destroy the US economy. I think you would obviously agree.

That also means that we must agree that 'money printing' taken to an extreme can have catastrophic effects. So where we disagree is where we are on the line between the points of inherently valuable and stable currency, and lol funny money.

When the interest on the debt is starting to exceed our total discretionary budget, let alone at a major inflection point in global economics/relations, I tend to think we're prettty far down that line.

I think that's another interesting metric. It's also a rather terrifying graph. [1]

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S

You can see a table of the deficits per year here [1], which should answer your question.

[1] - https://www.thebalancemoney.com/us-deficit-by-year-3306306

Haha. People just have different drives. I'm definitely a space enthusiast, but also see this as an awesome idea.

In the grand scheme of things I think humans will colonize all environments, and starting to master water would open up immense amounts of land, so to speak.

Outside of Biden and Obama (first term only interestingly) deficits were far less. As recently as 2015, it was "only" $442 billion, and generally less than a trillion.

USAID's budget was upwards of $50 billion, so cutting that single organization brings us 5-10% of the way there.

And its primary purpose was propaganda of the sort that, when effective, just ends up driving us into conflicts half way around the world and making it very difficult to ever truly improve relations with 'foreign adversaries.' I'm tired of being at war with Eastasia.

And Musk has zero power. He can only make recommendations. The 'President Musk' stuff is a transparent effort to try to foment antagonism between Trump and Musk by exploiting Trump's insecurities.

The problem you have here is differing perspectives on, for instance, current government financial responsibility.

The government is currently $36 trillion in debt with that debt growing at an exponential rate. Our annual expenditure of interest on the debt has exceeded $1 trillion per year and will soon exceed the entire discretionary budget of the US.

And this is happening as growth starts to slow and other countries continue to reduce both their reserves and dependency upon the dollar.

Many don't see this as sustainable, or really even remotely sustainable. And so working to create more sound governance and spending today is motivated precisely by an effort to prevent a catastrophic crash.

Like think about to back before the housing crash. There were numerous shows on TV about people getting a house (often with near 0 deposit), adding granite counter tops, and then reselling it within weeks for a $20k+ profit.

Anybody could see that that sort of economic system could not possibly be stable, but most people have this instinct that a status quo must inherently be stable, but that's just not true. That unstable things have not crashed today is hardly an argument against them crashing tomorrow.

I'm not sure it matters if it's attributed or not. Very few people are capable of setting their biases aside, so even intimate hearsay is mostly just going to be driven by subjective opinions about the person in question.

I mean I think we've most all seen literally the exact same thing at any reasonably large institution.

That is the Weimar Republic Era as Germany suffered through the brutality that was the Treaty of Versailles, and it was hell. Germany was suffering through hyperinflation, lack of availability/affordability of basic goods/necessities, massive unemployment, extreme civil unrest, and of course the rise of numerous extremist groups.

The Nazis' base was largely made up of disaffected people down on their luck. And in this era of Germany there were vast numbers of them.

Your assumption was just absurdly wrong. While the Nazis never gained majority support in a fair election, they did gain near 40% with a message that would scarcely resonate with anybody able to have a remotely pleasant, or even 'normal', life.

This is also why the Treaty of Versailles was so completely idiotic. Make life awful enough for a people and they'll start to feel they have nothing to lose. We effectively guaranteed WW2.

1920s-1930s Germany was "a/the center of research, culture, etc."?

This is especially rich in the context of a post pedestaling against disinformation.

While I'm unsure about chickens, they're also [ab]used for larger meat animals like cows and turkeys because they make the animals grow larger, faster.

The fun thing is - nobody knows exactly why this happens. There's a bunch of hypotheses, but they're exceptionally hand-wavy.

The forms are still available: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/how-app...

Looks like this affects the online form filler. But there was never any online renewal - the form filler just filled out a pdf with what you gave it that you then needed to print and mail anyhow while also jumping through any hoops your local consulate (who does the processing) also requires.

Happiness being subjective to cultural differences is a feature, not a bug.

If a culture is breeding widespread unhappiness (perhaps in exchange for maximization of economic growth over all) then it's something that should be observed.

That measurement of 'happiness' is inappropriate. Instead of simply polling people about e.g. life satisfaction it's based on a bunch of random metrics that have, at best, a mixed relationship with 'happiness.'

So for instance it turns out the 'happiest' countries in the world also have some of the highest rates of depression in the world.

Now obviously that's not literally impossible but ffs just poll people - it's not hard. Yes it will be extremely subjective, exactly like 'happiness' is!

I think if/when you have children you'll see that these sort of statements are not really realistic.

In a sustainable society every single woman needs to have a bit more than 2 children on average. The 9 months are not so bad though so come with a significant number of side effects and a substantial number of hospital visits, both planned and unplanned.

After birth the real fun begins. At first you'll be nursing every 2 hours, constantly. Over time that changes to every 3-4 hours but that is now the new normal, 8 hours of sleep is a thing of the past. And nursing isn't just whip out a boob and a few minutes later you're done, depending on your baby, his mood, teething, growth spurts and a zillion other factors it could last an hour all the while his hunger for the next window also grows!

And, probably as an evolutionary warning mechanism, the mother will frequently experience vivid nightmare playing out every horrific scenario that could happen, experience anxiety (probably as a result of the former) and so on. That fades over time but never really goes away.

And back to breastfeeding, if a mother doesn't constantly drain her breasts it can lead to infection/mastitis/blocked ducts and all other sorts of fun stuff.

And that's just a sampling of some of the issues (completely ignoring baby himself here) for one child, at which point it's time to get ready for number 2, let alone 3.

This is a multiple years long process that completely consumes your life. Now imagine pairing all this with a 9-5 which in reality is rarely just a 9-5.

There's a reason the West's fertility has fallen well below replacement. This fantasy of doing a great job both as a mother and as a corporate drone, just isn't realistic at all.

The article is what you'd expect from the headline.

The change in gender differences is easily explained by more girls pursuing music from an earlier age. More people (as a ratio) from a group competently doing something means you end up with more highly successful outliers from that group.

Blind screening started in the 50s.

You can create toy experiments to 'prove' just about anything - this is why social psychology has a replication rate in the 20% range. Though it's really much worse since that's only independently repeating the same experiments, not adversarially challenging hypotheses, at which point the entire field looks about as reliable as astrology. Quite appropriately since astrology, which was also studied as a 'science' for centuries, was highly influential on the founding fathers of modern psychology - Jung in particular.

And group differences are not only genetic. Why do you think that, for instance, 70% of American football or NBA players are black, while only 8% of baseball players are?

Go look at an average MBA classroom and know what you'll overwhelmingly see? Pretty much what a sampling of CEOs looks like, especially once accounting for performance.

I can't wait for Project Unify which just devolves into a brand new p3-mini type naming convention. It's pretty much identical to the o3-mini, except the API is changed just enough to be completely incompatible and it crashes on any query using a word with more than two syllables. Fix coming soon, for 4 years so far.

On the bright side the app now has curved edges!

Exactly. This [1] headline from the NYT pretty much sums up the issue: "To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions."

Different groups of peoples have different strengths and different weaknesses. This isn't some sort of a problem that needs fixing.

And if one does want to 'fix' it you need to start way earlier than at the e.g. hiring point. Want to beat that kid who's been playing violin for hours a day since he was 6? Ok, then your target demographic is 6 year olds, not professional orchestras.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...

Theres some sort of something quite special about HN and I suspect it's the lack of anything special.

The 'Unreal community' has enough relevant content that it'd take a lifetime to go through it all. I'm sure the same is true of Unity.

Maybe not the more general stuff you might be after, but those forums+ deserve a mention.

The whole concept of 'got noticed' runs entirely contrary to the notion of merit, to an absurd degree in tech.

One does not hope to get noticed - they strive to excel on their own or by bringing others in to help them.

Your merit is not what you might achieve, but what you do achieve.

Merit is somewhat paradoxically only partially about ability. If it turns out the most testably intelligent person chooses to spend his life flipping burgers and smoking weed then he has no more merit than the most testably dumb person who chose similarly.

In other words a perfect meritocracy isn't Gattaca. It's just a place where your rise isn't going to be directly constrained by things outside of your control, like in Gattaca - being directly rejected because of one's DNA.

In a meritocracy a fool who finds and excels at a niche can thrive, while a genius who doesn't exert himself can languish.