Hayvok

> This article assesses whether Hellenistic war-elephants were given alcohol before battle…Unfortunately, despite the recent rise in scholarly interest on war-elephants, this issue remains overlooked.

This is the best abstract ever.

FoundationDB was originally a startup, purchased by Apple in 2015.

Sadly —

> "The number density of primordial black holes with a mass above this cutoff [MP BH > 1.4×1017g] is far too small to produce any observable effects on the human population."

Ideally, trying to reform the government & its activities shouldn't require a team to burrow all the way down to the literal payments system & call individual balls and strikes.

But I assume that is indicative of how unresponsive the bureaucracy has become to political direction from the president & secretaries.

I thought the article was pretty level headed. Here’s the status, here’s the future, here’s what AUKUS is doing, here’s what China is doing and is capable of doing. What smugness or jingoism were you referring to?

I actually found it refreshing to not have a “journalists’” opinions and world-view slathered all over the article. I’m smart enough to form my own opinions about things, thanks.

This is the way.

Married, 4 kids, she’s stay at home mom.

Joint checking, savings, investments, home ownership, cars, everything. I do most of the account management and planning because she hates doing it.

We have no concept of fairness in spending. If she wants something truly expensive we talk about it and how it fits in our budget. I do likewise, but in general we both kinda know what the boundaries are, and there’s zero score keeping. She probably spends 3x on herself compared to me, and I’m fine with it. I know she has the best interests of the family at heart.

Large purchases like cars are the result of weeks of research, discussion, planning, budgeting, etc.

If you mean the subsequent detonation of an ICBM in the atmosphere, I think we are in uncharted waters there. The expert discussions of what effect the atmosphere-EMP would be is fascinating/horrifying to read.

In your water example, perhaps that liter of water used to cool the datacenter is offering software to a hospital that offers life saving treatments. How will you measure the trade-off of a liter of water used one way vs. another?

Likewise, how can we distinguish between a ton of carbon emitted in the datacenter vs. a ton of carbon emitted by an airplane? Again, you might train an AI and emit one ton of carbon and that AI a save a million lives. Contrast that ton of carbon emitted with any number of frivolous airline flights by rich talking heads.

It may sound like I'm being deliberately difficult/obtuse, but this is exactly why regulation is so difficult to do well, especially in such a rapidly innovating space.

> I think we need better regulation of these companies to prevent them from doing actual damage rather than trusting them to self-regulate against hypothetical ones.

What is the actual damage you are concerned about and determined to regulate? Simply saying "environment, workers, and the economy" is so broad I can't imagine what an effective regulation would look like. How would you even word the regulation?

I think the unspoken assumption here is that China is already producing at near-maximum capacity, while the United States is barely trying and has lots of headroom.

Is the assumption correct?

I haven't been able to find a study on America's plan for local naval production capacity given such a conflict, which is kind of stunning to me. Perhaps there are classified studies.

This conflict (assuming it lasts multiple years) would play out across the Pacific, possibly offering replays of old Pacific battles from WW2. Large numbers of naval assets and expeditionary forces squaring off across millions of square miles of blue-water ocean. Lots of naval tonnage attrition.

America is either guarding it's planned production capabilities close to the chest, or they anticipate winning such a conflict quickly without the tonnage attrition I just referenced.

Or my searching skills are weak.

Population is a single, low-resolution parameter into a theoretical ship-building-capacity equation, which really needs a basket of parameters. Raw resource availability, fuel capabilities, naval training, coastline details, etc.

Great Britain historically had a fraction of the population of France and other European powers, but consistently out-produced the rest in ships and projecting naval power.

American, yes.

Can’t speak for the whole country, but in the Midwest, rural community I grew up in, people had a “better safe than sorry” attitude, and would call police on mere suspicion that you were up to no good or that something was amiss.

Even told them afterward how wrong they were, they’d probably shrug and say it was still good for the police to check.

We did night CTF (~9 pm) at our local grade school campus. Easily 40-50 kids. We just rode our bikes to the gathering. Similar rules to what this article had, except no out of bounds. We had kids making huge circuits around a nearby corn field to evade detection.

It was indeed someone of my best childhood memories.

Unfortunately it was all brought to an end because people kept calling the cops. They’d see kids after dark at the school and just assume we were up to no good. No property was ever damaged, the principal knew what we were up to, etc. Wholesome fun.

After the fifth time of coming home with a “the cops showed up” story, our well-meaning parents asked us to please find another game to play.

> We asked adults who say the public education system is going in the wrong direction why that might be. About half or more say the following are major reasons:

> Schools not spending enough time on core academic subjects, like reading, math, science and social studies (69%) > Teachers bringing their personal political and social views into the classroom (54%) > Schools not having the funding and resources they need (52%)

As someone who has lots of friends in conservative circles, these sentiments ring true. (I am surprised "health decisions / vaccine mandates" aren't in the list.)

A lot of my wife's friends are choosing to homeschool, and #2 on that list is their primary reason. They acknowledge its likely a minority of teachers engaging in that behavior, but their feeling is "it only takes one" to ruin the entire school experience for their kid, and create a ton of problems for them to deal with at home.

(Disclaimer: we homeschool for reason #1 and because my wife was homeschooled and it's a comfortable way for her to run our schedule and home.)

> I remember hearing about "Daniel in the Lion's Den" and Daniel sitting in flames in church and in my Children's Bible stories.

Minor nitpick, but it was Daniel's three friends who were thrown into the furnace, not Daniel himself.

They are both indeed memorable stories.

You mentioned twice focus on inputs instead of outputs - can you elaborate further? This feels counterintuitive to me.

> What Thursday's revelatory reentry footage promises is a world in which launch is cheap and abundant. No longer will we need to worry so much about mass or volume, which have been tyrannical overlords to mission planners since the inception of spaceflight nearly seven decades ago.

Using the metrics in the article, Starship costs come out to around $300 per kilogram launched.

This is an order of magnitude drop over existing launch costs, which are already lower than ever courtesy of the Falcon rockets.

(Wikipedia estimates Falcon costs are $3,000 per kg. Other providers still significantly higher.)

Any time you change such a fundamental pricing unit in a market, there is going to a huge amount of change in market opportunities.

People dismissing this have their heads in the sand.

Here’s the KKR link - https://media.kkr.com/news-details/?news_id=48701629-ae4d-4d...

VMWare (Broadcom) link - https://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2024/02/broadcoms-euc-division-...

Great to hear about your MIL improving!

Last year my wife got the “you need to lose weight now or else” speech from her doctor. Diabetic signs starting to appear in her numbers. I was terrified for her.

12 months of Wegovy and she is down 52 pounds, and all diabetic signs have disappeared. Her doctor is thrilled.

And, (not that this matters much to me) her looking like a million bucks is a nice bonus too.

> [Gila monster] venom helped to turn an obscure hormone into potent diabetes medications, and then into the most promising weight-loss treatments in history. We’re still discovering how much they’ll change our lives.

How many times have I heard someone complain about the weird things we spend our research dollars on?

You just never know what discovery or insight is out there, so we have to go look everywhere. Remember this the next time we’re voting to cut research dollars on some gross bug in a jungle you’ve never heard of.

No doubt the phrase “bring home the bacon” will outlive our civilization and future historians will confidently assert to one another that we were all paid in rashers of bacon.

The review thread (start at the bottom & work your way up) reads like a Show HN thread that went negative.

The paper initially received some questions/negative feedback, so the authors updated and tweaked the reviewers a bit —

> "We welcome discussion... The main contribution (that seems to have been missed by some of the reviews) is that we can use very shallow models to compute good vector representation of words."

The response to the authors' update:

> Review: The revision and rebuttal failed to address the issues raised by the reviewers. I do not think the paper should be accepted in its current form. > Quality rating: Strong reject > Confidence: Reviewer is knowledgeable

> [CTO] Elshenawy reiterated the company would be narrowing and refocusing its efforts, information shared last month following the resignation of co-founder and CEO Kyle Vogt and some executive shuffling that included appointing Craig Glidden, GM’s EVP of legal and policy and a Cruise board member, as chief administrative officer at Cruise. Jon McNeill, a member of GM’s board, was also named vice chairman of the Cruise board. McNeill, who joined the Cruise board recently and was previously chief operating officer at Lyft and president of Tesla, now serves alongside GM Chair and CEO Mary Barra.

So who exactly is in charge at Cruise right now? I'm lost.

If you're like me, and you had no idea what "goodwill impairment" meant, and wondering 'what does this billion dollar expense get Etsy?'

Investopedia: "Goodwill impairment occurs when a company decides to pay more than book value for the acquisition of an asset, and then the value of that asset declines. The difference between the amount that the company paid for the asset and the book value of the asset is known as goodwill."

> Goodwill impairment: Goodwill impairment expense consists of non-cash charges related to the impairment of the goodwill of Depop and Elo7.

This is a level of circular definition that makes the head spin. Depop and Elo7 were Etsy acquisitions. I haven't read the SEC filing in depth, but I assume this means that Etsy is acknowledging they overpaid on both these acquisitions, and that their value is in reality far less than they thought at the time.

I'm not sure what the accounting advantages are here for Etsy, maybe someone else with more knowledge could weigh in?

> Now for the harder part: why do some young Americans embrace such views? Perhaps surprisingly, education levels do not appear to be the culprit... the proportion of respondents who believe that the Holocaust is a myth is similar across all levels of education. Social media might play a role. According to a 2022 survey from the Pew Research Centre, Americans under 30 are about as likely to trust information on social media as they are to trust national news organisations. More recently Pew found that 32% of those aged 18-29 get their news from TikTok.

Question asked. Question answered.

There is legitimate debate around the deterioration of news organizations as accurate, trusted sources of information. But TikTok and its ilk are nothing but propaganda vectors, and not in a direction we are going to enjoy going.

That's what I'm curious about — everybody went up significantly in 2022, but if China was paying double for imports, then why wasn't everybody else having to pay double as well?

China procures most of their lithium through trade, so they're tapping the same global markets as everybody else.

> The spot price of battery-grade lithium carbonate, trading in Shanghai and serving as a benchmark

I'm not sure why the Shanghai price is being used as the global benchmark without any qualification in this article, because in 2022 China was paying 2x per KG more than the U.S.A. and Europe. Everybody saw a significant increase, but nobody quite like China, where it looks like a bubble.

Prices have come down globally in 2023, but the Chinese price is now much closer to the U.S. and European price.

Regional price index: https://businessanalytiq.com/procurementanalytics/index/lith...

Counter-drone warfare is going to be huge over the next couple decades, so this is very interesting to see.

Drone warfare right now is small in numbers and small in range, because of limitations around the technology — even so it is having a ton of impact on the ground in Ukraine.

A good analog might be early World War 1: planes were incredible scouts and they were occasionally disruptive to troops, but it wasn't really practical to deploy them in large, coordinated formations, fit them with heavy payloads, or use them out over the oceans. By World War 2 that entire calculus had changed, with horrifying results for all combatants.

Right now an American carrier group might be vulnerable in littoral (shoreline) combat to drones, but retreating even a few dozen miles offshore would be enough distance to dampen the threat — drones just don't have the range and anti-jamming to be useful on the scale of hundreds or thousands of miles.

In 15 years though? 10x the range, the speed, the numbers, and potentially outfit a carrier ship specifically for deploying drones en masse. Play the same scenario out underwater with "drone carrier submarines".

The key question for all American military commanders and defense contractors to answer: how do you shoot down 1,000 drones without losing a ship?

Now overlay all of the bases, airfields, and other assets throughout the Pacific. There are several islands that are effectively stationary aircraft carriers.

In the event of any Pacific war with the Americans you would be staring down 8-10 super-carrier groups, another 8 smaller carriers and a dozen or so islands each equivalent to a super-carrier’s power.

Most nations would struggle to defeat a single carrier group. Imagine fighting twenty.