charliea0

Yes - or Fourier series or other decomposition into a sum of orthogonal basis functions.

Boy the this timeline is turning out to be very cyberpunk.

I wonder how long before people start bumping into lamp posts because they are distracted by one of these.

If the US had an alien space ship, why keep it secret? Seems like it would a globally important discovery and diplomatic / technological credit for the US.

Even if the US were inclined to keep their space ship secret, other countries should be encountering UAPs given that the US sees hundreds per year. Some ground control operator should eventually share an in-focus picture at some point.

Definitely less aliasing, but it looks blurrier than the baseline.

The machines need lots of fuel which either needs to be chopped from forests or dug out of coal mines. Both those tasks were labor-intensive and costly.

Some water mills were cost effective though.

Reading this, I get the sense the author used ai for at least the first draft. Maybe it’s just the style of their writing.

This makes the reasonable observation that copyright, like other kinds of property, is a social technology. It’s very reasonable to ask if the machine could be improved with shorter periods of monopoly or with a smaller bundle of rights.

I wouldn’t jump all the way to concluding that destroying copyright wouldn’t have ill effect though. The concept was created to incentivize and monetize creative production. There is a Chesterton’s fence prohibition against tearing up the incentive machine without knowing exactly what would replace it.

Mylar balloons would make a bunch of sense.

If the objects were much closer to the camera than the focus that would explain why they can appear to move so quickly.

More like a duel where one person has a revolver and the other a bazuka. Getting shot is better than exploding, but still very bad.

I’d be interested to see how this broke down by income decile. My impression is that spending usually expands to meet income. Americans have a lot of access to short-term credit and use that to cover unexpected expenses.

Unfortunately, it looks like a bunch of Americans end up carrying debt month to month.

I'd guess about 0.1% complete.

Not a lawyer, but the claims seem pretty kooky and the plaintiff will probably have trouble establishing standing. For example, he claims that OpenAI wouldn’t provide him free access to a ChatGPT-using service and therefore misuses its nonprofit status.

Even if OpenAI were committing tax fraud in this way, they wouldn’t be required to give the plaintiff free stuff. That’s a bit like complaining the Met Museum’s gift shop won’t give me a free t-shirt. If the museum were separately breaking the law, they still aren’t obligated to give me a free shirt.

I think the labor market model is a poor fit to extremely high level executives. Theoretically, they work for the board and shareholders but in practice they have a lot of power over their own terms of employment.

Pichai for example is both CEO and one of the directors. He was groomed by Page into his current role and maintains it more by dint of internal politics than by lack of alternatives.

Our immigration system seems like such an incredible squandering of human talent. So many people struggling to through complex bureaucracy just to winnow down the number of immigrants.

I really wish we could fallback on the free market here. If someone wants to live, work, and pay taxes in the US, they should be free to come.

Immigration is the US‘s main sources of national strength, yet we waste it.

Okay, but then why do folks move there? My impression is that it’s mostly for work.

I feel like commercial fusion is such a lost cause at this point. For electrical generation, it’s going to have high fixed costs which will likely make it uneconomical for the same reasons fission struggles. The cost of fuel already very low for traditional fission and renewables.

I don’t see what advantages it would have over wind, solar, fission, etc.

Yes. It takes years but recovery can be higher than expected. Some Madoff victims ultimately got back something like 80%.

I wouldn’t have high expectations, but it’s probably worth preserving documentation and making sure your claim is considered.

I’m pretty curious who their large client in Chicago was. Might be Jump Trading but who knows?

This is so cool. I can imagine a very fun future of semi-reliable digital assistants attached to every service or tool.

I feel like this is a bit over-stated, but Taiwan does project a great deal of naval power into the surrounding waters.

Also, though this article reads a bit like HoI4 analysis. I think you need to more carefully consider all of the nations agency and motivation rather than consider them victory points to be won or lost.

TLDR: This is a joke where the author leads Chat-GPT to claim it’s written by humans.

I think there’s an xkcd on modeling complex systems with a single parameter: https://xkcd.com/793/.

More seriously, I think the predictive power of this hypothesis is low. Clearly travel time is important to maintaining a connected empire but it’s probably not the limiting factor.

10% something I haven’t anticipated happens. :)

My priors are 30% Twitter “fails” in either bankruptcy or by losing most of its userbase, 30% Twitter more or less continues - perhaps unable to meet its new interest payments, 30% it’s much more profitable albeit in a very different form.

As an alumni, not psyched to hear this. I’ve always loved walking around campuses and thought openness was a great aspect of the university culture.

I’m pretty skeptical lawmakers are the best ones to make technical decisions like this.

Well demand rising is an abstraction for relative balance between buyers and sellers of a good.

Say there’s one free apartment in NYC and two marginal buyers submit bids: Alice and Bob. If Alice offers $1000/month and Bob offers $1200/month, then Bob gets the lease. The marginal rent is $1200.

If another apartment is built then Alice leases it and the marginal rent is $1000. Similarly, if a new buyer Charlie enters the market and bids $1500 then $1500 is the marginal rent.

The number of people with apartments depends only on the number of apartments built. Which buyers get apartments depends on their relative ability to pay. The price depends on what the marginal apartment-buyer will pay. That is the lowest amount offered that still gets an apartment.

NYC has substantially higher taxes than most of its suburbs. It also has a much higher draw due to its dense population supporting fancy bars, arts, and other world class amenities. The network effects of living close to other interesting, cosmopolitan, or just niche social group people are also valuable.

By comparison, direct air capture of CO2 costs something like $600/ton. At 40 billion tons of global CO2 emitted per year it could cost 24 trillion per year to remove current emissions.

That said, I would bet there’s better economies of scale / ability to innovate lower cost zero-carbon energy sources with direct air capture rather than a giant space project.

My napkin math is that a bubble with a shadow the size of Brazil and made out of graphene weighing 0.77 mg per square meter would weigh about 25 million kg. Using multiple smaller bubbles could reduce this by at most a factor of four.

At a cost of $1,000-$10,000 per kg it seems possible to get this to space with a total cost on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars.

You could do a estimate of the graphene itself but I think the cost would be similar.