bitcurious

I got the impression that stories about the Ukraine/Russia was have been consistently suppressed, including stories about the tech side of the war - drones, hacking, etc. Is this impression mistaken?

Oh boy. First, most Israeli Jews are of middle eastern origins, expelled from their homes in the surrounding Arab states. Second, like someone else noted, possession is 9/10th of the law, i.e., the world belongs to the living. Third, the Jewish people are the indigenous people of Israel - there is evidence of Hebrew being the language of the region 4500 years ago.

> 20k deaths in just two months is a massive death toll for such a short conflict.

This is the number provided by Hamas. Per Israel, 15k people have been killed, approximately 10k of whom are civilians.

> For comparison, it's more than the civilian death toll in the nearly 2-year-old war in Ukraine.

This is according to numbers sourced from Russians. According to Ukrainians, >20k civilians died in Mariupol’ alone (a city 1/5th the size of Gaza).

Genuine question - why not? If (for the sake of argument) the money is raised in the coastal United States, why are they not entitled to disburse it conditional on respecting LGBTQ rights?

> FYI, Most people here have no idea what LGBTQ means and those who do don't give a damn. Those leading the making of laws and noise making are just populists after their bread.

How do you reconcile these two statements? Populists by definition appeal to public sentiment, to the detriment of principals or morality. If no one cares, why are they wasting their time?

It's like the old joke "no one goes there, it's too crowded."

I can’t articulate this as a how-to, but I’ve found that I can occasionally rewrite some low-level assumptions about myself in such a way that let me accomplish stuff. Like I convinced myself that working out every day isn’t a choice, it’s a default. It’s how I am. This means that the choice is to not work out, and that’s kind of lame, so no choice == working out.

I suppose if they have credible offers that changes the calculus.

It's unlikely that 5/7th of the employees of OpenAI have even had a real conversation with Sam Altman. That's a lot of fucking people, for a young and hyper-active company and a very busy CEO. Given that, I consider it unlikely that 5/7th of those employees would put their livelihood at risk to protect Sam.

Reparations in the context of this antitrust lawsuit == a settlement of the class action lawsuits that will inevitably happen. Same word, but nothing to do with other the other kind.

Apple Studio Display was a bit of a splurge, but makes the hours of meetings I’m in every day much more pleasant.

Really bad name. “Switchblade” is both evoking of violence on its own, and the name of a suicide drone.

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

The ACLU of Virginia did defend the rights of white supremacists to organize in Charlottesville in 2017. I believe the resulting violence triggered some aclu soul searching and I’m not sure where the organization landed on defending the free speech of nazis and the like. Speaking for myself, I hope they keep to their principles.

This “expected value” way of thinking about income and philanthropy was inherently flawed - it didn’t take into account the risk of preference shifting. If you do good now to do good later, and later you change your mind, you’ve still done good. If you smear shit now to do good later, and later you change your mind, you’re just left with a lot of smeared shit.

What are the odds of a 50 year old having the same moral framework that they did when planning their future at 20? I rank it as rather low by default, not factoring in the corrupting influence of mega-wealth, or the road taken to achieving it.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing - laws should allow for some level of ambiguity, and should be written for outcomes. The enforcement is a negotiation between agents bound by the law and agents tasked with upholding the law.

It’s like hiring a web design firm and then showing up with a complete mockup - give them room to work.

It’s intuitive that a patient who can spend an order of magnitude more time on his self care, and can self-articulate their symptoms, can occasionally self-diagnose better than a doctor. It’s not intuitive that a clinician with 4 years training and the same 30 minute window to diagnose you would do better than a physician with 12 years training.

AdBlocking has been free and effective for the past 20 years, how did the internet not die?

> However although there is archaeological evidence of cannabis smoking in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa stretching back quite a long time, there is virtually no evidence that it reached Europe before the 19th century.

Herodotus wrote of the Scythians smoking what was presumed to be cannabis. This article details a bit of it:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/150522-...

My long-held theory on this is that low denomination currency acts as a slight break on inflation.

If you have the new iPhone with the action button, you can set a shortcut to ask questions of ChatGPT. It’s not as fluid as Siri, and can’t control anything, but still much more useful.

“Golang” used to be a google-endrosed synonym for Go; the official domain was golang.org for a while.

> A friens of mine is kindergardener, and he came close to quitting, as his illusions of what his job is were utterly shattered, as it became clear that many parents did not care about the safety of their own and other kids or about the staff.

This framing assumes that the teaches had an accurate risk assessment, and the parents didn’t, but in retrospect we have seen that depriving kids of socialization was much more damaging to the kids than covid exposure was. This conclusion was reached by the majority of developed nations, whose schools either didn’t shut down or reopened months before schools in the US.

> Estonia based startup

But also, publicly complaining about your clients is not a good move for a startup.

It’s a fuzzy statistic. It can happen once but be viral enough for 19% of students to have heard of it.

I asked it to give me a listing of hybrids under 62 inches tall, it only found two, with some obvious ones missing. So I followed up about one of the obvious ones, asking how tall it was. It said 58. I pointed out that 58 was less than 62. It agreed, but instead of revising the list, it wrote some python code that evaluated 58<62.

So as a search tool, it failed a core usefulness test for me. As a chatbot, I prefer gpt4.

Architectural engineering and zoning are orthogonal. As an example, zoning is about how tall a NYC skyscraper can be, engineering is about it not falling over. Your article is about the latter.

>Objectively, at present he's stoking a fire comprised of $44 billion dollars, committing anti trust crimes, and endangering a besieged foreign nation.

What do any of those have to do with his engineering skills? Do you think good engineers can't make bad investments, or are inherently moral people incapable of antitrust violations?

It's a bit bizarre, the presentation felt claustrophobic in a way I can't explain, and haven't experienced with their prior work.

Realistically, the tax payer that doesn’t drive in Chicago is likely a fiscal drain. Which is ok, but it’s silly to pretend that folks who drive are being subsidized by folks who don’t, outside of maybe a small number of upper income taxpayers in NYC.

If you cheat a little you’d say “she said goodbye too many times” and leave before implied in English also. But then the song wouldn’t sound as good.

Great article! I think missing a bit of framing. When I got really into watches, this is how I came to think of it. Fundamentally, a watch has three parts, and you can play with all three, which results in fun combinations and unique/dead end lineages.

1. a power supply - the most common are either a mainspring (mechanical) or a battery (electronic). You can play around with how you power both - mainsprings can be manually wound, self-winding through wear (a weight moves around and winds it). Outside of the wristwatch world there are other cool winding mechanisms, such as air pressure variation. With electronic ones the basic options are replaceable, self-charging through motion, self charging through sunlight, or directly rechargeable.

2. an oscillator - the most common are a quartz crystal (electronic) or a hairspring (mechanical), but there are some other oddball ones out there. Most of the innovation here is around making the performance temperature/humidity/position agnostic, but at the high end there is a lot of play with new materials and architectures.

3. an interface - the most common is the 12 hour clock face (mechanical) or the LED digital interface (electronic). Although both can immediate the other, for example a jump-hour mechanical interface can resemble a digital clock. Here I think the fun stuff is mostly on the mechanical side - there are many, many cool "complications" which through some series of gears can allow a watch to also keep track of the day, month, moon cycle, day of week, year, leap year, tide (set locally), an alarm, or a a chime every hour. Of course you can do all of that digitally but I guess it feels less special

What's really fun, which this article is focused on, are the combo watches. My three favorite lineages:

Seiko Spring Drive watches are in the article - mechanical power supply, electronic oscillator.

Bulova Acutron - electronic power supply, mechanical oscillator. This one is pretty special as the oscillator was a magnet-driven tuning fork. It was far ahead of its time in terms of accuracy, but of course a dead end as far as practicality goes. It has a cool but annoying property of audibly humming.

Citizen Cosmotron - an electric power supply, mechanical oscillator. This is a more tradition hybrid, where the oscillator is a balance spring. This lineage has some neat engineering for setting the date+day of week - the orientation of the watch actually controls which complication you are working with, using the same button. Also this has a time-sync feature where you can snap the second hand to 12:00 with a press of the button and the watch pauses until you let go of said button.

New mechanical oscillators: https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/the-silicon-powered-speed-... https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/zenith-defy-lab-oscillator...