Empact

One of the ways psychologists classify people is between those who are maximizers/optimizers and those who are satisficers/stop when things are "good enough."

As someone who is very much on the optimizer side of things, and experiences the struggles described in this article, the lesson I take to heart is that while satisficers tend to be happier, optimizers get more done.

Your optimizer tendencies make you into an expert, they open up new opportunities for learning and growth, they have the potential to have real consequence in the world. Be thankful for them, even as you guide them to their appropriate application.

You’re begging the question. If fluoridation decreases IQ through developmental neurotoxicity, is the lost cognitive capacity in the general population justified by the protection of children with irresponsible parents (who do not enforce eg the brushing of teeth) from the consequences of caries? This is a real moral problem we ought to contend with.

I believe society suffers from lower IQs, and that targeted interventions against childhood caries can be applied effectively without dosing the whole population. Why don’t schools teach toothbrushing? Why not have the school nurse check children’s teeth, or have a dentist come to school periodically?

Creative labor is not entitled to the work parent comment is describing. We employ labor because it is beneficial to us, not merely because it exists as an option. Creative labor’s responsibility is to adapt to a changing world and find roles where their labor is not simply produced / exceeded by a computer system.

Practically speaking, the work described would most likely never have been done, rather than been done by an artist if that were the only option - it’s uncommon to employ artists to help with incidental tasks relative to side projects, etc.

Should we really be taxing young people more when those young people are not propagating due to high housing costs, etc?

Article 2 says “the executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” That means the power to “enforce laws, manage national affairs, and oversee government agencies.”

It’s Congress’s role to allocate funds to certain purposes, and the President’s to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” including overseeing the bureaucracy that implements them.

The President already has dictatorial power over the bureaucracy, as per the Constitution.

Everyone in the United States is impacted by government insolvency and the economic collapse it will inevitably lead to if unchecked.

Everyone is impacted by the fact that money-printer-fueled government spending crowds out private spending / investment / growth.

What happens when Congress is asleep at the wheel or in on the take?

Difficult to confirm but various sources are reporting a steep drop in poverty from the 50s to the 30s over the past year. https://x.com/michaelaarouet/status/1891031131375423725?s=46 https://x.com/bowtiedmara/status/1883202966900900218?s=46

Bikes produce far less tire and brake wear due to weight etc.

My suggestions:

  * switch from microfiber to e.g bamboo sheets
  * donate blood periodically to reduce your body’s load https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2790905
  * add a filter to your washing machine to divert microplastics from the wastewater e.g. https://planetcare.org/

What didn't I understand? What of value is contained in those theses?

What did you learn from the Politics of Smell thesis?

“Pay no attention to that canary, this coal mine is perfectly fine”

Distinctions only hold esteem over time if they are worthy of it. The last two PhD’s that crossed my feed had dissertations on “The Architecture of Whiteness” https://x.com/garrett_rhianna/status/1889609612367700377

And “The Politics of Smell” https://x.com/drallylouks/status/1868782615324770561

If the PhD is losing its lustre, it’s because the Universities took the shine off.

Services subject to natural monopolies are good candidates for being run cooperatively, by / on behalf of the market participants, so that there is not the incentive to extract rents via market power. Government-run may be practical from e.g. a fundraising perspective, but these services could be run wholly privately as co-ops.

So you still believe government-funded research is equivalent to facts in 2025? What about the replication crisis? The political control of research finance e.g. in Alzheimer’s research?

It takes either an extreme amount of naïveté or motivated reasoning to maintain that perspective, IMO.

The article you cite is from September 2024. Where are you getting December?

In Argentina, the informal (free market) peso to dollar rate is called the “blue dollar,” it rose from about 200 to 1200 pesos per dollar in the 2 years prior to Milei taking office and has held relatively steady since: https://bluedollar.net/informal-rate/

You have to consider why Milei was elected in the first place - a dramatic break from typical Peronist politics with a historic 55% of the vote.

The picture in Argentina was not rosy before Milei took office, it was a country on the verge of hyperinflationary collapse, with a population declining through emigration, a largely informal economy in decline, and people struggling to keep up with dramatic inflation.

I don’t know of another case where hyperinflation was arrested without introducing a new currency. Milei has apparently done it by simply cutting spending, which naturally comes with some pain as the subsidies and government employment are curtailed, but a sound currency sets the stage for distributed investment, lending, entrepreneurship and growth.

More recent policy changes have focused on opening up the country to exports and imports, which will be key to bringing about prosperity through growth in industry, and bringing prices into line with international norms. https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/javier-milei-d...

Several sources report more recent data showing a drop to 37-39%.

The picture in Argentina was not rosy before Milei took office, it was a country on the verge of hyperinflationary collapse. Given that starting position, IMO it’s remarkable how quickly things have turned around.

https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/argentina/expert-reports-say... https://x.com/marionawfal/status/1870100943418630363?s=46

At scale, we can restore the soil the same way it was built up in the first place, through rotational grazing of ruminants. I keep chickens to that effect and am planning on sheep. Very low-effort, highly productive animals, each, even apart from their soil building.

Here’s a short list of meaningful causes which have been advanced in my lifetime by groups of single issue voters at the local and state levels:

  * making gay marriage broadly available
  * making concealed carry (and Constitutional carry) broadly available
  * removing barriers to housing construction in cities across the land (the Yimby movement)
  * making the Idaho stop law applicable to 10 states
  * changing the voting method from plurality to approval or IRV in several cities and states

Voting is one of the important ways our government is steered, cynicism in this area is self-defeating. Instead, band with a group of single issue voters who elevate one issue over all others, and vote for whomever aligns with that issue, if their election prospects are threatened, they will support you, as with my favorite quote from a politician: “when I feel the heat, I see the light.”

Just because smoking and exercise made you visibly fitter, doesn’t mean you should disregard the consequences of smoking.

We have to invent domain-specific language when there is no existing term for an important concept. Each of the terms you mention except ascii (which is an acronym) is imbued with contextual meaning: thread of execution, kernel as in essential core, float as in floating point, register is in that which records and reflects. I’m willing to bet I will find similar pre-computer uses if I go looking.

Which is to say they represent a different approach than simply making up a word devoid of meaning.

> Even “string” is technical jargon.

"string of characters" as a concept substantially predates the first computers: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22string+of+characters%22&l...

There are a few answers to the long-term security budget:

1) We could maintain fees through compression, that is, by making each on-chain transaction representative of many off-chain transactions. This is beginning to happen with the lightning network, and other technologies are in the works to advance this concept.

2) Mining will become more integrated with other industrial and residential processes, which will reduce the cost of security, from a compensation standpoint. Think bitcoin miner water and space heaters in many homes, etc.

3) It's also likely that in the future institutions that rely heavily on bitcoin will voluntarily subsidize security to some extent, for the same reason they invest in vaults for other instruments. Personally I'm planning to start running a lottery miner at home just for the fun of it.

This didn't sit quite right with me and I think I've pinned down why.

The nature of code is that it is communication: it communicates action to the computer and behavior to the reader. Variable names are not for the computer, they are for the reader, so, whenever possible, the names we use should be meaningful to the reader.

If the name requires specialized knowledge, such as "what does this name mean," it is lingo, which is sometimes necessary, but should be regarded as a smell, as it is often better to use language which does not require specialized knowledge, so that the reader will be able to make sense of it without a thesaurus.

According to the concept Domain-Driven Design, we should be using names from the domain itself in the program. So what could be the proper name here?

Well, EPD is short for Extended Position Description, which is a notation for representing a particular board state. SAN is short for Standard Algebraic Notation, which is used to encode a particular move.

So an EPD SAN is a particular board position when a particular move is applied to it. I propose to call the combination a "play" which is the act of moving from a particular board position. The code would then be:

  let difficulty_by_play = //...;
  let existing_plays = //...;
  let unique_moves_by_play = //...;
  fn play_to_condition((epd, san_plus): &Play) -> _ //...;

The result is legible, the concept is meaningful, and a naive reader could make sense of the variables and operations. No cognitive / conceptual overhead.

Cleaner code, I would claim.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-driven_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Position_Description http://www.saremba.de/chessgml/standards/pgn/pgn-complete.ht...

There is an upper limit on the aggregate value of money - somehow related to the amount of stored value in the economy. On the other hand, there is no lower limit on the value of a dollar.

If bitcoin reaches $1B it will be through some combination of dollar depreciation and bitcoin appreciation.

https://www.fiatmarketcap.com https://assetmarketcap.com

Fungibility is one of the important properties of money. So a non-fungible token has less ability to accrue monetary value.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money#Properties

Transacting bitcoin via the lightning network is instant. Capital gains is a matter of policy and is likely to change at some point as bitcoin succeeds.