Michelangelo11

Of course, and (AFAIK) keto was originally a diet high in fat and very low on everything else.

OTOH, deli turkey is mostly very lean meat with little fat, and fat has by far the most calories of any macro. Hot dogs, on the other hand, are filled with various vegetable oils (which are made up of fat), as is normal for processed meat products.

Interesting. So, a kind of precursor to LLMs, or if you like, a pre-electronic, pen-and-paper latent space.

> Support is truly the thing that separates the wheat from the chaff.

Yes, absolutely. True in any industry, and especially in ones like this.

In addition to the ridiculousness of the whole situation, it is unbelievably ridiculous that their customer service is the same incoherent, pro-forma slop that's now the norm for retail customer service everywhere.

If you're offering financial services for business, you really need customer service that lives up to the name and, when a problem occurs, tells the customer the specific steps to take to fix it.

> Government sources called the strikes “hell fire,” citing significant damage to Pakistan’s air power. According to estimates shared by Air Marshal Bharti, nearly 20% of Pakistan’s Air Force infrastructure was degraded.

> Ammunition depots were also targeted, and key Pakistani assets such as F-16s and JF-17 fighter jets were destroyed. Among the casualties was Squadron Leader Usman Yousuf of the Pakistan Air Force.

Wait, this is describing serious, bare-knuckled war, not a border skirmish that got a little out of control. So either the article is just fantasy or ... um ... somehow, no mainstream media outlet in the West has reported on the terrible, bloody war between India and Pakistan?

Yes, but in that example, he specifically says the ugly surgeon has to be as high-profile as the carefully-coiffed, megawatt-smile, could-have-just-walked-off-the-Chicago-Hope-set surgeon you're comparing him to. It's a heuristic for choosing between experts of roughly the same rank.

> Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

- Karl Marx (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumai...)

How could they not?

Emergent properties are unavoidable for any complex system and probably exponentially scale with complexity or something (I'm sure there's an entire literature about this somewhere).

One good instance are spandrels in evolutionary biology. The wikipedia article is a good explanation of the subject: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_(biology)

Sadly, that doesn't save the system instructions. It just saves the prompt itself to Drive ... and weirdly, there's no AI studio menu option to bring up saved prompts. I guess they're just saved as text files in Drive or something (I haven't bothered to check).

Truly bizarre interface design IMO.

Wonderful comment. Thank you. I think the "theme park to its former meaning" line is very right.

Yeah, and maybe also a focus on grabbing all you can now, without regard for the future.

Feels like wherever you turn, you see a high-trust society disintegrating into a low-trust one.

"Today, China is not just safe, clean, and prosperous; by any objective measure, it’s the coolest country in the world."

No part of that sentence is true, except in a handful of urban islands.

Just to begin with, China is the country of gutter oil: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutter_oil

> I recently read The Secrets of Alchemy by Lawrence Principe, which I loved, especially because he tries to replicate ancient alchemical recipes in his own lab. And sometimes he succeeds! For instance, he attempts to make the “sulfur of antimony” by following the instructions in The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony (Der Triumph-Wagen Antimonii), written by an alchemist named Basil Valentine sometime around the year 1600. At first, all Principe gets is a “dirty gray lump”. Then he realizes the recipe calls for “Hungarian antimony,” so instead of using pure lab-grade antimony, he literally orders some raw Eastern European ore, and suddenly the reaction works! It turns out the Hungarian dirt is special because it contains a bit of silicon dioxide, something Basil Valentine couldn’t have known.

> No wonder alchemists thought they were dealing with mysterious forces beyond the realm of human understanding. To them, that’s exactly what they were doing! If you don’t realize that your ore is lacking silicon dioxide—because you don’t even have the concept of silicon dioxide—then a reaction that worked one time might not work a second time, you’ll have no idea why that happened, and you’ll go nuts looking for explanations. Maybe Venus was in the wrong position? Maybe I didn’t approach my work with a pure enough heart? Or maybe my antimony was poisoned by a demon!

> An alchemist working in the year 1600 would have been justified in thinking that the physical world was too hopelessly complex to ever be understood—random, even. One day you get the sulfur of antimony, the next day you get a dirty gray lump, nobody knows why, and nobody will ever know why. And yet everything they did turned out to be governed by laws—laws that were discovered by humans, laws that are now taught in high school chemistry. Things seem random until you understand ‘em.

Well, this example doesn't just fail to support the argument, but undercuts it. Basil successfully identified the kind of antimony that would work, -despite- having no concept of sulfur dioxide. He did not write down something like "not all kinds of antimony work for this recipe, so get a bunch of different kinds and try them all" -- that, or a stronger version ("sometimes the recipe fails, we don't know why"), would support the author's point.

So we're left with the author trying to argue that this alchemist thought the world was "too hopelessly complex to ever be understood" on the basis of ... the alchemist correctly identifying the ingredient that would make the recipe work.

Thanks! Yes, I agree 100% on it being underrated.

Yes, agree 100% with the "practice over and over" approach (I'm reminded of the "50 pounds of pots" story, shared by Derek Sivers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6097663 ). I already do that, I'm just looking for sources to supplement it.

Yes, but I mean the reason it's called "brutalism" isn't because the buildings look "brutal".

Yes, but that is not the reason:

> Brutalism is an architectural style of the 20th century that mainly uses concrete as a building material. The term "brutalism" comes from the French expression "béton brut", which means "raw concrete".

https://industrialkonzept.com/blogs/magazine/beton-brut-berl...

This is very, very long, and I've read about the first third while skimming the rest. (In general, Venkatesh's essays tend to be enormously padded with a very low signal-to-noise ratio, so this isn't too surprising.) That said, my impression is that you could condense this essay to, roughly, the following:

"It's always optimal to leave some energy aside rather than use it to increase performance in areas where you want higher performance, since your environment is more unpredictable than you think, no matter how unpredictable you already think it is."

Stated this way, it feels relatively trite for anyone who's already spent some time thinking about this sort of thing, and also largely unobjectionable (you could argue for some caveats, e.g. in situations when you're putting energy into increasing your energy capacity, foom-style).

Would anyone here disagree? If you think I've missed something important or I'm not giving the essay enough credit, I'd be really curious to hear your points.

Yeah, war is one of the most frequent topics of his books: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Fussell#Works

Which actually surprised me, because I first learned about him through his book on class (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-clas...).

"Shortly after my book was in print, I began to reread Gibbon, ... and after I started it occurred to me to count the errors that his expert editor, J. B. Bury, recorded in the footnotes. I do not mean misstatements due to later research, but Gibbon's errors in using his own sources – wrong names, taking a town for a man, saying the opposite of what the cited source plainly says. I found 20 such in volume 1, forty in vol. 2, 20 again in 3, at which halfway point I stopped. And the curious thing is that the text with these blemishes is of Gibbon's own revised edition. But even so, there is nothing like Gibbon, Burckhardt, and others whose work is or was thus pockmarked."

— Jacques Barzun

Yes, good point, thanks. I was thinking of the high end of disciplines with strong ties to industry, mainly STEM and business, but that's actually just a very small, although prominent, part of academia.

I do think it's a major issue that academia is increasingly bureaucratic and corporate, but I don't quite agree with the article. It's not that very smart, truth-motivated people have bad people skills (e.g., off the top of my head - von Neumann, Feynman, and Newton were all pretty good with people when they needed to be), it's that they are motivated largely by discovery and not by status and money. But academia today is essentially a machine for amassing status and money at the expense of creating genuine new knowledge, which drives away those who want to create knowledge.

What exactly was the issue, and did they burn people on purpose or through some kind of extreme carelessness and indifference?

Err ... no ... the "nuclear" part comes from "nucleus", in the general sense, and the expression long predates nuclear technology.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_family

This is really intellectually bankrupt, whether on purpose or not.

The main issue is that they're basing a large part of their claims on ZIRP-era data, but the economy (obviously) changed completely once the 14-year gush of money was turned off in summer 2022. For example, "Quiet quitting", which the article cites to support its argument, was only possible in the peak ZIRP period 2020-2022 and today is unimaginable. Really, I would expect The Economist of all outlets to grasp this.

Also, the article is very light on specifics, e.g. it says "Their home-ownership rates are higher than millennials at the same age. They also save more post-tax income than youngsters did in the 1980s and 1990s." OK, but how much? If it's a few percentage points or less, that's largely noise, but if it's a double-digit amount, it's a genuine difference. As it is, we don't know, so the "unprecedentedly rich" claim in the headline is unsubstantiated.

Besides this, a bunch of areas related to inflation and prices are handled sloppily. For example, the article says Zoomers are paying about the same percentage of income as previous generations for housing and education, but it doesn't look at the quality of either -- I wouldn't be surprised if Zoomers are getting less for their money (less square feet of housing, degrees with worse job prospects, etc.). Also, as someone who lives in a southern European country, I can tell you that plummeting unemployment numbers in places like this (they cite Spain's and Greece's in a graph) are due to people emigrating en masse in search of high-paying, year-round jobs.

All in all, my biggest takeaway from this article is to confirm my impression that The Economist today is intellectually sloppy and baldly makes arguments with weak or no evidence in support. I'd gotten that impression after having subscribed for a few weeks not long ago, and this article, which I might have written off as a fluke otherwise, cemented it.

> We replaced documents with PowerPoints because it allowed lack of structure and emptiness to look professional

Boy, that's good.

Really, the Dead Internet Theory was a prophecy we seem to be trying to make true as fast as we can.

> ... it is often easier to see how to improve the dataset than to design new heuristics. Once you do that, you almost have a guarantee that the Neural Network machinery will get you the results.

Money quote. Applicable to so many areas of ML/AI.