Balgair

I really think we all should sync up and talk more. I want to make this bigger.

Have you read the Syntopicon by Mortimer J Adler?

It's right up your alley on this one. It's essentially this, but in 1965, by hand, with Isaac Asimov and William F Buckley Jr, among others.

Where did you get the books from? I've been trying to do something like this myself, but haven't been able to get good access to books under copyright.

Yeah, thinking a bit more here, you've created a Syntopicon. I've always wanted to make a modern one too! You can do the old school late night Wikipedia reading session with the trails idea of yours. Brilliant!

Really though, how can I help you make this bigger?

Covid has an estimated R of ~1.1 this winter. Meaning that the current vaccination rates of the population in the US are not adequate to stop the spread. Everyone has a part to play in that spreading.

Current strains do not seem to be as 'bad' as they were in 2020, but that can change at any time, and is dependent on the individuals.

Look, our family lost 4 people to Covid, all of them above 60 years old. I miss them still. I miss my Grandmother in law, her voice, her humor, and even a little bit, her dementia (strange!). I miss my uncle, I miss his singing the 12 days of Christmas around the piano, his slight Geordie brogue, his passion for electronics. I wasn't that close to the other people, but their loss affects the family a lot still. All those memories, those empty seats at tables. Sorry, here, I'm just still going through things here even 4-5 years later.

What translation is this? What part of the religion (Maccabees, Mormons)? Is there Ge'ez portions (46 book in OT!)? How about the dead sea scrolls?

I think, if it takes off with some of the probing from here, then adding in a harder mode with larger apocrypha or duterocanonical texts would be great. Maybe make a section where you can select the translation and sect you want to learn about.

Great. But most (?) of the business out there aren't paying for the big boy models.

I know of a F100 that got snookered into a deal with GPT 4 for 5 years, max of 40 responses per session, max of 10 sessions of memory, no backend integration.

Those folks rightly think that AI is a bad idea.

Though no longer pertinent explicitly, the original sin of America is a potent literary force. We still feel it's sting in our African American literature nearly axiomatically. Almost by definition, any southern gothic literature will revolve around the effects of slavery, which includes some of our greatest novels.

Per the Great Gatsby, the story itself is one of the most powerful arcs out there: The Hero arc with a disillusionment ending. It's not exactly a negative change arc for the protagonist (Nick), but it's meant to feel like one. Nick is physically better off than he starts out, but his opinions and feelings about the world at large are negative. He has grown up, fought the dragon, healed the sick king, beaten the bully, encouraged the coward, and gotten the damsel. But Fitzgerald adeptly makes them all hollow. It's a great and quick read. A really tight plot and good prose.

But there are very much worse times. Clearly.

However, the adage with marriage applies with kids too: Marriage is not a capstone, its a cornerstone. You build a life together.

The same is sorta true with kids.

I have an in law that has severe autism issues that had a career and children. They never advanced in jobs, couldn't hold friendships, got neglected at work and kinda abused, got bad assignments. They were a lawyer for a long time, so the law itself was useful to them and their autism, but clients were hard. Their marriage was clearly strained the entire time before their spouse passed. It's been years and they still can't grieve or process the loss, likely due to the autism. Their children don't have these autistic issues, afaict, and those relationships are strained now that the grandkids are here and the children have leaned more about the issues of the grandparent.

Still, made a successful career of it, saved well enough into 401ks, and is now a millionaire.

In those days, their autism was just a quirk, one most people didn't like. And if they had help and strategies when younger, they would have been more successful and had a much better life.

It's not like taking crude, cracking it, then refining the plastics, yadda yadda yadda. It's more an fast automated assembly thing.

Schrodinger's deep state here. Too dumb to care about laws and too dumb to care about themselves too.

Fun facts about The clock:

You can't put anything in the room or take anything out. That's how sensitive the clock is.

The room is just filled with asbestos.

The actual port for the actual clock, the little metal thingy that is going buzz, buzz, buzz with voltage every second on the dot? Yeah, that little port isn't actually hooked up to anything, as again, it's so sensitive (impedance matching). So they use the other ports on the card for actual data transfer to the rest of the world. They do the adjustments so it's all fine in the end. But you have to define something as the second, and that little unused port is it.

You can take a few pictures in the cramped little room, but you can't linger, as again, just your extra mass and gravity affects things fairly quickly.

If there are more questions about time and timekeeping in general, go ahead and ask, though I'll probably get back to them a bit later today.

I go back to the study frequently when looking at MRI studies, and it always holds up. It always reminds me to be careful with these things and to try to have other be careful with their results too. Though to me it's a bit of a lampooning, surprisingly it has been the best reminder for me to be more careful with my work.

So thank you for putting yourself through all that. To me, it was worth it.

Especially if I can get some sort of stats on the questions.

Like, if there were a lot of questions about when a character did something, then I know I wrote that badly.

Or if people talk about a set of characters, then I know that those characters made an impact.

Or if no-one asks about the book itself, but about some plot point or worldbuilding idea.

In general, if I, the author, can get a peek at this data too, it would be of immense value to me (and my publisher).

When someone says: "Source?", is that kinda the same thing?

Like, I'm just going to google the thing the person is asking for, same as they can.

Should asking for sources be banned too?

Personally, I think not. HN is better, I feel, when people can challenge the assertions of others and ask for the proof, even though that proof is easy enough to find for all parties.

The point about it being gambling, and therefore, taking advantage of idiots, yeah that rings true. The mass proliferation of gambling and the true compulsive addiction and ruin of mostly young men, it's hard to look at oneself and state that they caused that pain for other and their loved ones.

The next step is, of course, to do the very hard part: use the money gained for good. The author mentions that they are a hypocrite for only speaking out after making their money. They need not be so. Finding legitimate ways to use the ill gotten gains for good is a bit of what they built their skills in, after all.

I hope to someday see the next post of theirs detailing how many people they helped and how many lives saved, families reunited and made sound again, based on how they used this new wealth for good.

They are very far from the end of their story, but the midpoint, so to speak, has been passed.

The modal human experience was a farmer, far and away. Not the mean, not the median, but the mode. We have the numbers to easily back it up.

Marx agrees on this, Adam Smith agrees on this, John Locke agrees on this, heck even Keynes agrees on this; all (sensible) economists agree on this. If you do not have labor somewhere in the process, you do not have value.

“Equal quantities of labor, at all times and places, may be said to be of equal value to the laborer. In his ordinary state of health, strength and spirits; in the ordinary degree of his skill and dexterity, he must always lay down the same portion of his ease, his liberty, and his happiness. The price which he pays must always be the same, whatever may be the quantity of goods which he receives in return for it. Of these, indeed, it may sometimes purchase a greater and sometimes a smaller quantity; but it is their value which varies, not that of the labor which purchases them.” says Smith.

From this Smith concludes that “labor alone, therefore, never varying in its own value, is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared. It is their real price; money is their nominal price only.”

It's a bit long winded (brief by his standards, though), but the essence is that labor ultimately determines if there is value. But, critically, not the amount of value. Marx would say that the amount of value is the amount of effort that goes into the commodity, something we now know not to be true.

Still, the point here with AI:

If the labor in the products and services that AI produces goes to 0, then the value of those goods and services must also go to 0.

As a brief example, look at chess or F1 racing. There are chessbots that can beat any human, there are F1 robots that can outrace and win against any human. Yet still, we find no value in watching a robot beat up on a human or on another robot. No-one watches or cares to watch those kinds of competitions. We only care to watch other humans compete against each other. There are many reasons for this, but one is that there is labor involved in the competition.

The stock market is at ~9.5% returns historically, inflation is likely at ~3% historically, so assume a little higher at 6.5% and that $1000 with a dollar a day increase is then ~$14,800, inflation adjusted.

If you go up to ~$100/mo at 6.5%, then you get ~$42,000, which is an honest start to a small business or college tuition.

The little extra per month really adds up here!

I may not like the administration for a lot of things, but this is one thing that I can really get behind.

If you put in $30.00 / mo , a dollar a day, then it goes all the way up to $10,700 , a 18x increase (42x over the $250)

Look, we can play with numbers all day long here.

The fundamental difference is the additional contribution amount. Finding just a little bit here and there makes a huge difference.

And getting people into the habit of putting a set amount away each month is the key. Priming this habit, getting folks to look past the next 2 weeks, to just consider the adult they are raising, I think that will be hugely affective.

I may not like what the current administration is doing in a lot of things. But for this little one thing, I can at least applaud this little one thing. I think it will really help out a lot of people in more than just the pure cash.

https://bsky.app/profile/bretdevereaux.bsky.social

Amazing site and filled with great male content.

But, umm, anyone know of any other good male-centric sites out there?

All I got is Esquire.com, and it's clearly not the same kinda thing.

It's getting rid of cheap methods.

Scantrons and bluebooks were always a way that made it cheap for institutions to produce results. Now those methods kinda seem silly, right?

500 person freshman lectures seem kinda absurd now, right?

Teaching via adjuncts that had 3 days notice for the class and are paid nothing is kinda scammy, right?

R1s professors whose tenure evals have nothing to do with teaching is kinda wrong, right?

The Oxbridge model of 5-10 person classes with a proctor is what the education with AI is going to be about. It's small, intimate, and expensive.

But the thing that was supprising to me, as someone that remembers the world before the internet, is that anger is the thing that makes people stay on a site.

Before the internet came along, one would have thought that Truth would be the thing. Or funniness, or gossip, or even titalation and smut. Anger would have been quite far down on the list of 'addicting' things. But the proof is obvious, anger drives dollars.

There's no putting this knowledge away now that we know it.

The lesson only question is what are we going to do about it?

The locals there will try to pin which celebrity you are or if they have seen you before on the television.

It's not a 100% thing, maybe a 10% thing, of course.

But the more remote you are, the higher the hit rate.

It's because they know they are remote and off the paths, so they think that the only reason that an American is there is because they are filming something. Note this doesn't work with French speaking areas.

The cereal aisle scene from Hurt Locker always did it for me