advael

Isn't that kind of a non-sequitur? The claim made was that renewable energy would still be a finite resource to some degree. It's possible that the available energy surplus will be too big for any decisions about usage to matter, but that's a strong claim and you're doing nothing to make it here.

A lot of people believe in a higher power. If trusting in this supposed "market" brings you comfort and clarity in a complicated world, I do not begrudge you it. But invoking it doesn't address the claim it's answering

It's also clear that "the market" does not care enough about environmental impact to even do stuff like remove the current significant fossil fuel subsidies present in most government budgets, nor stop individuals or organizations from consuming or selling said fuels, natural gas, or plastic products at massive scales, so it's unclear why it would allocate energy in a way that didn't deprive crucial priorities.

Like the theodicy on the invisible hand's problem of environmental collapse ain't lookin' good is all I'm saying

A lot of this is attributable to the way our society is designed at a high level

With the exception of a tiny number of people in exceptionally autonomous jobs (either working for small organizations or in high-powered roles) both government and corporate bureaucracies optimize everything they can for efficiency and replicability at a massive scale, which means that their processes are ironclad, most people have no ability to make decisions that matter, and caring about the results of those decisions cause them either to break protocols and be punished, or try and fail to create different outcomes under those constraints. Most people are unable to choose a job that does better than this and still support themselves. Thus, most people spend a significant chunk of their life, the part where they're supposed to be the most engaged and alert, under a condition of essentially learned helplessness

Increasingly, people's options are restricted in terms of what they can do outside of work too. A lack of third spaces means that most socialization takes place in your home, your friends' homes, or more realistically, an internet platform that is designed and controlled by the same bureaucratic drives. Digital platforms for things like payments, combined with monopolization of most sectors of the economy, has made commerce involve fewer meaningful choices and salient interactions for the "consumer". Increasing use of digital mediators for other interactions and increasing control exerted by the companies that run these mediators create fewer meaningful choices they can make there, too. People often cite the high degree of convenience of many everyday activities as a quality of life improvement that past humans couldn't imagine. This might be true, but the way it's implemented comes with a tradeoff at every turn with meaningful choices. We have in many contexts traded knowing things and deciding things for having a company do it for us, and I say "we" because this is by and large a tradeoff that most people didn't individually choose

A lot of people get this idea in their head that most people are stupid. But even people who aren't particularly educated or bright have a lot more vibrancy, a lot more ability to care when they have autonomy than even very educated and intelligent people do when they don't, and autonomy is a muscle that can grow with use and atrophy with disuse. The design of modern societies has drastically limited the ability of people to act autonomously, to choose most things that matter, in a ton of contexts that take up most of most people's time. Of course they don't care. But like most systemic issues, this author is so unwilling to consider systemic solutions that even after walking up to the brink of seeming to get that this isn't a problem you can just solve at the ground level by caring yourself, the conclusion is still just that people suck, most of them, but somehow individually. Like many people who think they're surrounded by idiots, the author's one example of someone who "cares" is a literal billionaire who is personally responsible for creating similar immiserating authoritarian conditions in workplaces he runs and for people who use the products of his businesses, a textbook defector who has claimed more autonomy for himself exactly by contributing to the systematic ways in which others are deprived of it. There is no way to solve systemic problems at an individual scale

While it's technically true that the specs are public, the implementation not being public is most of the issue being solved

Love to see someone genuinely trying to improve at something and I'm glad to have played a tiny part in it

Yea sorry if I came off caustic there, dealing with really dismissive attitudes toward juniors I'm actively trying to foster has perhaps left a bad taste in my mouth

I suppose such a bootcamp may exist but wow, that's crazy to me

But yea, having now read the whole thing I'm mostly taking issue with the writing style I guess. I find the method they tried interesting but it's worth noting that it's ultimately just another datapoint for the value of multi-scale analytic techniques when processing most complex data (Which is a great thing to have applied here, don't get me wrong)

I read to like the first line under the first bold heading and immediately this person seemed like an alien. I'll go back and read the rest because it's silly to be put off a whole article by this kind of thing, but what in the actual fuck?

I was probably not alive the last time anyone would have learned that you should read existing code in some kind of linear order, let alone programming. Is that seriously what the author did as a junior, or is it a weirdly stilted way to make an analogy to sequential information being passed into an LLM... which also seems to misunderstand the mechanism of attention if I'm honest

I swear like 90% of people who write about "junior developers" have a mental model of them that just makes zero sense that they've constructed out of a need to dunk on a made up guy to make their point

Again, I really don't feel qualified to weigh in on most of these matters, though I will say that I generally do prefer direct citations if you'd like me to take the epistemic credibility of a claim more seriously than any other thing someone on the internet said (in other words, saying "go look it up" provides no more additional credibility than simply making the statement, and is thus kind of pointless, and in fact you take a not insignificant epistemic credibility hit for my purposes by suggesting that asking an LLM for factual information should be taken as a reliable source)

That said, it's interesting to see how the supply shocks of a global pandemic can shift these kinds of relationships. It doesn't surprise me that Mexico, being a huge source of food for the US, is the largest exporter to it. What I do wonder is how much exports pertain to manufacturing relationships. Like in the case of Mexico -> US, I think we wouldn't count e.g. stuff we buy for the produce section to be manufactured goods, but that would still count toward import/export numbers. Does this apply to other things too? Do things like IP count?

Huh. For all the claims that US manufacturing is down, it does seem that if we adjusted per-capita it's on par with China based on the figures presented here, which I really didn't expect to see

I'm no expert and of course I have no clue if it even makes sense to measure per-capita manufacturing share, and also assume a lot of other factors matter here - what kinds of things we're manufacturing, how much those products serve domestic versus export markets, etc - but it's still surprising

It's weird to me how often people come away from interacting with the poor with a reaction that would seem overly stilted and unfair if it was put in a cartoon

I mean if you wanna angel invest I have some backburner projects I can't get done without some funding for hardware and time spent not earning an income, which I could probably spin into startups

Wait so you're saying that it's important to allow predatory business models to continue in the industries that do the most harm through constant consolidation to support ballooning costs?

Like the healthcare system's consolidation and scale that allows it to deal with massive extra costs and the degree to which that system is beholden to predatory technological models is if anything a great motivating example for the potential benefits of a ban

Okay but for the vast overwhelming majority of people, what they actually need is "a helping hand, a business loan or grant etc"

You talk about this like this is trivial, but it's the kind of material help that would make a difference for almost everyone who is currently not doing what they want in life

Yes, no one can teach you to self-actualize. People's material circumstances are rarely a result of inadequate self-actualization or agency, despite what the self-help industry would like you to believe.

Most "high-agency" people who succeed started out with either adequate resources to at least support themselves while they tried stuff, reliable backup plans (like living with supportive family), or help in the form of stuff like grants or startup funding. People who don't have that need that, regardless of their mindset or abilities. There are exceptions who got incredibly lucky, and they are a rounding error among rounding errors. That is the world we live in. There are ways to engineer a world where this is less the case, but at least in the US, we seem to choose not to move in this direction at every opportunity, and freak out when even minor forms of the security necessary to act with agency take hold for large numbers of people (See: The business world's hysterical reaction to COVID relief)

Yea but you know what's even better than a tax? Not being able to release those products onto the market. I really doubt products whose "value-add" is lock-in would be able to survive black-market dynamics. But Apple, Google, Microsoft, John Deere, what have you can totally afford extra taxes, and they probably even have the market power to just foist those increases on their customer base and not lose them because they're effectively a captive market in the current regulatory regime, and that's also the kind of market power that makes it so that you don't have to compete on price. I consistently can get cheaper laptops by seeking out ones that don't include windows licenses, but this clearly hasn't affected the laptop market much

Also, let's say I'm gonna undercut someone on price for electronic devices. Unless I'm starting from a place of great personal wealth and don't take any capital at all, this needs investment, which means that an obvious solution to any scenario in which I'm meaningfully harming the bottom line of one of these incumbents could just be buy it out from under me, which is indeed how this generally plays out in the real world

If we are serious about regulating monopolies, we have to understand that remedies that rely on raising operating costs are simply always going to be ineffective

A "tax" like this is essentially equivalent to a fine, and a fine is a price

Also, companies can just price the additional cost in, blame the government for the price increase, and mislead consumers about the tradeoff being made. A ban is harder to do that about

So the idea is to ban the practice for smaller players without the scale to eat the costs?

No thanks, an outright ban is necessary. This will not prevent manufacturers from doing business no matter how they may whine about it, and frankly if this does somehow kill their business it should

Generally when people refer to the "times" they are discussing the vibes over some aggregate. Zoom in enough on anything and you start to see different individuals with unique circumstances, but this doesn't make futile the entire endeavor of observing larger patterns

Optimistic times always end when people who won power in them fight to hold on to increasingly more of it, and tend to only come back once they fail, stop, or fall.

People really worry about fake video and images and whatever but I have to say, the correct heuristics both already exist and have existed for a long time:

1. Anything on the internet can be fake

2. Trust is interpersonal, and trusting content should be predicated first and foremost on trusting its source to not deceive you

This is imperfect but also the best people ever really do in the general case, and just orders of magnitude better than most people are currently doing

The issue isn't models like this, it's that people are eating a ton of information but have been strongly encouraged to be credulous, and a lion's share of that training is directly coming from the tech grift industrial complex

I wouldn't even say this is the most compelling kind of tool for plausible-looking disinformation out there by a long shot for the record, but without actually examining why people are gullible there is no technology that's going to make people accepting fiction as fact substantially worse, or better, really. Scams target people on the order of their life savings every day and there are robust technologies and protocols for vetting communications, but people have to know to use them, care to use them, and be able to use them, for that to matter at all

I think the claims here are kinda weak, not gonna lie. It's unclear to me that this means of adding case-by-case additional conditioning data to improve results is particularly novel or effective compared to the popular StyleGAN-based attribute walk the overall approach is based on (Though as a side note it's definitely fun to see this kind of thing again after it's fallen out of favor in recent years with all the attention large foundation models have been getting in the generative space), and as a machine learning result, as far as I can tell this is kind of just saying "if you have additional highly-relevant data you can slightly overfit your model to cover a specific case better"

Is there something I'm missing here?

Sure seems like we ought to be more aggressive about this whole anthropogenic climate collapse problem

Like maybe problems like vast swaths of the world becoming both less livable and less arable all at once is somewhat to blame for all the refugee crises?

Not to be "political" or whatever

A major reason why petrochemicals are such an economical solution in so many places in the supply chain is that petrol companies are drastically subsidized by governments. Merely ceasing those subsidies might go a long way to help

Several of today's "business leaders" and the various judges appointed by the ascendant kleptocracy seem to constantly argue otherwise. What's the actual plan for doing that?

Cuz quality is not equivalent to standardization, and sometimes the latter is undesirable

There are few drugs for which withdrawal symptoms can include death, but alcohol is one of them and it's legal for adults to consume it recreationally. I don't think elucidating the risks of any substance is ever a bad thing, but it's also disingenuous to frame this as presenting "both sides" of an issue.

The claim that a drug has some potential side effects simply has no bearing on the question of whether prohibition is good policy, because the case against prohibition isn't and has never been that any drug is completely risk-free or cures every disease or makes you shit rainbows or whatever nonsense, the claim is that adults should get to make those decisions for themselves

Yes! I think people should understand the risks of anything they try, and it's imperative to do good research, combat misinformation, and do anything we can to allow people to know enough to make informed decisions.

If by "precautions" you mean "restricting people's bodily autonomy and sending cops after people who don't comply", as is currently widespread policy, this is very clearly not very effective and either of the widespread direct harms caused by implementing these policies - not the least of which are the chilling effect they've had on basic research as well as a proliferation of erroneous psychopharmacological pseudoscience - and the obvious erosion of the fundamental right to self-determination and bodily autonomy would to me seem more than adequate to outweigh such a benefit even if it weren't a total fiction. Carceral prohibition is bad policy on principle and in practice

I wouldn't say most, maybe a little under half, and usually these are pretty minor effects that don't bother the person very much, and for the most part seem within normal subjective variance, just perhaps jarring because of the change. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some extreme cases, but it's kind of alarmist to view it as ultra scary compared to even the effects on your adenosine cascade from persistent caffeine use. I haven't personally had any of these despite having tried a number of psychadelics, and I get the mindset that anything that could be permanent sounds like a pretty serious risk, but as harms go this is quite negligible in practice.

I think it's pretty silly to include ketamine as a psychadelic to be frank. Ketamine is legal as a horse tranquilizer, which is to say it's primarily a sedative and a CNS depressant. However, high doses can result in a dissociative euphoric state known colloquially as a "k-hole", which I guess some people view as a kind of "trip", the mechanism and psychoactive presentation are pretty different from what you get from e.g. LSD and Psilocybin.

I think the only reason these are grouped together is that ketamine is also seeing a renewed interest in research into microdosing as a depression remedy, but this seems to be mediated by a metabolite of ketamine and may be more of a direct remedy for a chemical imbalance than something like therapeutic trips. In other words, the grouping isn't psychopharmacological, but the zeitgeist of this moment in public perception of these drugs, which has been shaped by fifty-four years of the nonsensical logic of the prohibition enacted by the Controlled Substances Act in the US, some of the trappings of which have also been adopted by other nations, as often happens in a world where US policy has outsized influence both through trade and at gunpoint

Personally I'm skeptical of a lot of psychopharmacological interventions for complex disorders like clinical depression. SSRIs for example strike me as a series of remarkably irresponsible experiments with drugs that appear to permanently alter cognition on wide swaths of the population. I view psychadelics and possibly ketamine as not necessarily more effective overall, but far less dangerous in terms of unknown effects

No country has a carceral state quite like the US, but the quality of life difference between drugs in a given state that are legal and ones that aren't is stark. I've experienced this by traveling places with restrictive but different drug regimes. Stuff on a drug schedule your best case is get a doctor to prescribe it and in the US overpay for it severely because this chokepoint is the only place that can legally sell. Compare to buying any OTC drug, and the difference is obvious. There is no ID process, there is competition to provide better quality at a lower price. There is no way you can fuck up and get yourself or someone else arrested for having drugs you/they're not supposed to. And every illegal drug is still available somewhere, it's just worse and more dangerous

Others point out that no commonly used psychadelic is physically addictive. But also, the cost of prohibition dramatically outweighs the benefits. It creates pretenses for police corruption and militarization. It creates massive cartels in drugs, both criminal and "legal" (or at least low-liability for the cartel kingpins like the Sackler family), with perverse incentives all the way down. It destroys the trust between doctors and their patients by forcing doctors to serve as agents of the state when exercising the nonsensical authority to determine what substances adults can try for their ailments even with full informed consent. It destroys families and neighborhoods for "crimes" that amount to punishing self-harm with unconscionable cruelty - in effect kicking addicts while they're down. It also does not solve in any meaningful sense the problem of drug addiction. It's catastrophically bad policy that has no place in a free society