MeImCounting

Theyre incentivized to serve any and all ads, if they are scammy illegal or otherwise google doesnt care because theyre insulated from any potential consequences.

I marvel every time I see people on HN talking about being served ads on youtube videos or elsewhere. You would think here of all places adblock would be standard.

Thats a good point the knives he was familiar with were probably case hardened! So you would get to mild steel just like you said if you kept removing steel.

Nowadays though, knives are generally homogenous or some other composition like san-mai which will have the good steel in the center all the way through so even if you grind it down to a toothpick most modern knives will still have the good steel on the edge. Modern metallurgy means we can have high hardness, high toughness, high wear resistance and high corrosion resistance all in one composition. See Magnacut and other modern powder metallurgy knife steels: https://knifesteelnerds.com/2021/03/25/cpm-magnacut/

I am sure there are still some case hardened knives but for the most part case hardening is a historical technique. Same goes for the type of laminated construction you describe above.

All told the metaphor makes sense historically and in context but taken in the context of modern knives it makes less sense. This is interesting in and of itself because the meaning of metaphors and sayings can change drastically across time and social context.

I was being silly and pedantic but thats an interesting distinction!

I imagine Laozi probably knew how to have sharp knives so I defer to his wisdom as far as 4th century chinese knives go anyways. Perhaps they used a different technique there and then than the type of knife sharpening I'm familiar with.

Ok yeah but the thing about the knife is just not true, a knifes not sharp until you de-burr it and if you just continue to grind the edge youre going to just be building a bigger burr and removing metal, eventually the knife will be ground away but thats beside the point. Good knife sharpening does only need a bit of grinding until you reach the grit you want and then de-burr but youre not going to make it dull by continuing to remove metal.

Its not as hard to recognize good craftsmanship in furniture as in other types of products.

https://www.thosmoser.com/

Just gotta get some Gomer Bolstrood.

In all honesty I have no desire for furniture not made by someone I know or alternately made by some New England craftsman who gets paid more than I do and either way I want furniture that will last at least the next hundred years. I have no desire for furniture that my grandchildren wont spend a couple days fighting over.

It would be great if this thing ever left the ground with people in it but frankly I think we desperately need a third option.

Crew Dragon is great and Starliner might be someday as well but I dont think thats enough redundancy for national security reasons or for general crewed access to orbit.

Interesting findings but is a sample size of 30 particularly useful? I dont know much about statistics or how studies like this are usually done. Does someone more educated want to chime in on the results particularly in context to the small sample size?

woof,

The conspiracy theories abound in this thread.

This is what I was trying to say above but much more detailed an eloquent. Theres a lot dislikes in this thread but not many folks addressing the points.

The thing about high density places with a ton of infrastructure is that wired will always be the best because you have close access to infrastructure and its likely to already be built in. For rural areas or even suburban areas the equation starts to tip to orbital wireless for the reasons you state above and also geographic realities make ground based wireless unreliable in places where there are mountains valleys canyons etc.

Yeah land based networking just makes less and less sense when you look at it from first principles, wireless is fast enough for most connections it has enough bandwidth if distributed and being in orbit makes widely distributed networks trivial compared to doing it on earth.

I dont know if it will be starlink but I do expect(hope) ground based telecom to go the way of floppy disks in the coming decades

I think the big problem with historical anarchist discourse is that it ignores bad actors, edge cases and economics and where it does deal with those things its solutions usually look a lot more like totalitarianism or mob rule than some anarchist ideal.

The reason I think classically liberal economic and political values push us towards greater freedom is because I believe the following two things to be evident: 1. Freedom is related to wealth. 2. In the US we are for the most part more free than any other society in history.

Obviously there are exceptions to these but I think they are generally true. The reason I dont see statelessness and large democratic governments to be opposite ideals is because I see statelessness as an idealized result of freedom and democracy as the means to get ever closer to that ideal. This isnt really a unique perspective save for the fact that I think the idealized form of a free society doesnt have people forcing other people to do things.

Actually yeah I do think a global democratically elected constitutional government might be fine save for the issues of scaling that come with that much size. Probably something that various technological innovations could help with

Access to education has been supported by the federal government where individual districts lagged behind more wealthy areas. Without the federal aid poor districts would be much worse off as far as education goes.

Yes the federal government has long violated rights and done terrible things. We could go on listing the atrocities committed by the feds domestically and abroad for days e.g. forced sterilization, internment camps, vietnam, iraq, residential schools and the various iffy things the intelligence community did relating to drugs and black nationalism last century. I am not arguing that federal power is universally good or that increased federal power only resulted in good things but rather that its been a net improvement. You say its impossible to determine if we have more or less rights post civil war than before but I would posit it is very clearly more.

Yeah statelessness is a cool idea in theory. Like I said an ideal to aspire to as a society. The less coercion/threat of violence we have and the more freedom and empathy we have in society the better. Its just an ideal and not something we can achieve now IMO but still something inspiring to think about in conversations about state power or otherwise.

No because I dont use nitrogen salt fertilizer and dont have a lawn.

The nice thing about centralized democratic governments is that they can be changed based on the desires of the constituents. This doesnt always work perfectly but it does work more and more if broader sections of the populace spend more time being educated about policy and advocating for things they believe in. See civil rights as a primary example. In contrast decentralized governments without the failsafes of things like the bill of rights to prevent them from descending into tyranny tend to do just that. Whether its the tyranny of the majority in one region or the tyranny of the rich and powerful, thats a quick route to having human rights trampled, oligarchs put into place and anti-social movements gain power. This may become less of a risk as education becomes more widespread in a populace and indeed statelessness is an admirable ideal but I dont think we are there yet technologically or ethically and certainly not in the 1790s.

Yeah this was definitely an important shift. Before these changes the US wasnt really a country in the same way it is now. Antisocial elements in many states was dragging the rest of the country down and due to increasing federal power we were able to override them. Due to broader application of federal law and the bill of rights we were able to give more and more rights to the people denied them in the past. Due to broader application of federal power we were able to do away with things like state churches and gun bans. This is all good.

"pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain" is the natural state of living things. It is an invaluable drive that has brought about the vast wealth of this society we live in. It has driven people to explore the secrets of the universe and to build amazing things. This drive has been unceasingly pushing us toward a world with less pain and unfairness, with more equity and kindness since the dawn of humanity. That is an admirable quality in my eyes.

Sadness and suffering too, are a natural part of being alive and isnt something we should avoid. If I lost the ability to hike I would be sad. Because thats the appropriate and healthy reaction to losing something you care about. This sadness and suffering is part of the natural process of grief. When I have lost loved ones I have deeply grieved them with my entire being. I have mourned with every ounce of my self and eventually come through the other side able to move on. I would have it no other way. This process does not preclude finding other sources of happiness later but it is important to go through.

That "deeper source of wellbeing" you talk about is the fantasy part. Can you touch it? can you tell it you love it? Can you share it around a table with people you care about?

Ive long held that buddhism and related philosophies are a total cop-out. Instead of dealing realistically with the realities of desire and personhood it seeks a way out. Instead of coming to an understanding that happiness is a state to be pursued it builds this fantasy ideal of "zen".

Happiness is something we should work towards constantly. It makes me happy to go on hikes and see beautiful places it makes me happy to eat good food it makes me happy to spend time with loved ones and it makes me happy to build cool things. I pursue all these things happily, to achieve the state of happiness that they provide for me. You ask what happens if I achieve all these things? Well so far this week ive achieved 3 of 4 of the examples above and I am still happily pursuing doing them again.

This is pretty terrifying to me. As someone who messed around a fair bit with altered states in my younger years I can remember feeling very similar to whats described here and being stuck like that is terrifying.

There is in fact a line between using discretion and critical thinking and falling prey to paranoid superstition. This is important because there are people who prey specifically on people who are vulnurable to conspiratorial thinking and they are very good at it.

For about half the population of the US right now if the Daily Wire or like Joe Rogan came out and said that refrigerators are a deep state conspiracy that has been transing the kids, that would be it. No more refrigerators. There would be piles of refrigerators miles high at landfills across the country and having cold drinks would be a sure sign youre a corrupted liberal.

Privacy concerns mean Ill not be using VS Code any time soon. JetBrains gets my business for that reason alone

Ok I can see that teachers cant tell if a student has written an essay or used ChatGPT but how is that materially different from students paying for other people to write their essays? Its cheaper and easier? I knew students who payed for essays well before ChatGPT existed.

Any other examples? Not trying to defend OpenAI just interested in this idea that it has actually made anyones lives worse.

Wait whos lives are made worse by ChatGPT? I have not yet seen a claim like this

Somehow the least interesting part of GPT4o is the most talked about.

Its certainly exciting, machine vision and natural language interfaces are getting a huge push forward. I can imagine some great products built on the next generation of this tech. Accessibility and customer service are the obvious ones. But somehow this is maybe 1/3 of the discussion on this topic.

I have a pretty low opinion of Bukele in general. I think the tactics used for the seemingly miraculous suppression of gangs actually weaken the rule of law in an abstract way.

I think law and order rest on a contract with the governed. Robert Peel probably got much (though not all IMO) of this right and as far as El Salvador goes I think 5th and 6th of his Peelian principles are the most trampled in Bukele's El Salvador. Something about Bukele's regime somehow reminds me a bit too much of Italy in the 1920s.

I would like to think that the rule of law can be so strengthened and engrained in society and the citizenry so moral and educated and resources and care so abundant and given freely that down the road we wont need cops.

Yeah its pretty gross that the left is against ranked choice and it also somewhat validates the whole Trumpist "uniparty" conspiracy theory. I do think its coming in the future as most younger people I know are totally supportive of it if I bring it up with them. I also think it would increase voter turnout in younger demographics as well.

All in all I think its important that we as a society bring more people into the political conversation. I want conservatives and liberals in the same room disagreeing more. I think that would help more than any other single thing.

Yes this is true mostly because we as a country have become more and more disengaged from policy discussions and active participation in politics in general. This combined with older people being much more likely to vote and to vote conservative has led to the sort of multi-decade-incumbent ridden congress we have now.

This can pretty easily be solved by younger people voting more and enacting ranked choice voting. America is so cool because nothing (except maybe the bill of rights) is set in stone, we can change how it is!

Well theres a couple ways to come at this first theres the idea that as you put it N fewer incidents of cops murdering people is proportionate to some decrease in crime deterrence. Then theres my preferred perspective which is that the strength and legitimacy of the rule of law tends to be a greater force in benefitting society than any % increase or decrease of the other factors. I think weve done a great job creating the framework for a generally equitable and reasonable justice system (especially considering that its not set in stone and we can adjust it to be more effective as we see fit) and just have done a less than great job at implementing it.

To answer your question I dont think theres a clear winner but as I generally believe in the forward march of civilization I do think we can simultaneously disarm cops and reduce crime while also making the judicial system more focused on rehab and less on punishment. I'm bullish on empathy, freedom and peace!

What do you think?

Personally it means taking their long guns and any type of armored vehicles away. I dont want to see cops with SBRs, APCs, night vision equipment, kitted out rifles or any of the other trappings of military special forces or death squads. I could see perhaps some exceptions but not just for any municipal PD.

Along this line but to a greater extreme that I dont actually think is possible right now is taking all their guns away. Generally the argument for cops having guns is so they can defend themselves from armed and violent criminals. This implies using those guns to shoot said criminals before they can hurt cops. I am against this because I believe in the rule of law and that is circumventing the entire judicial system by making the officer capable of being judge jury and executioner. This is wrong and undermines the entire judicial apparatus.

I have been in the boonies, lived in the "hood" and seen plenty of illegal activity in younger days. Throughout all that crime and poverty the most dangerous people I encountered were the boys in blue. Holding cops accountable for their actions and taking their long guns and tanks away will certainly move the "safety needle" far more than any other single thing in the US today.