eucyclos

I think they mean cost of incremental units. 0->1 is much more expensive than 1->100 in software, unlike with things like lattes or houses

I'm agnostic on the question of objective moral truths existing. I hold no bias against someone who believes they exist. But I'm determinedly suspicious of anyone who believes they know what such truths are.

Good moral agency requires grappling with moral uncertainty. Believing in moral absolutes doesn't prevent all moral uncertainty but I'm sure it makes it easier to avoid.

Your last paragraph brings to mind an insult from a fictional culture where the very wealthy and powerful can live indefinitely: "<minor villain> has grown nothing. And he has planted nothing". Such a perfect summation of the attitude of a culture with lots of time

The trick is to tie your sense of identity to being a badass with more than enough self control.

I thought it was German and had an awful time trying to parse it. Makes so much more sense once one knows it's Greek.

Cool!

https://eucyclos.wixsite.com/eucyclos

There's an interview with Dan schmachtenberger where he talks about the worst book ever written (his opinion is that it's 'the 48 laws of power'). He made the point that being consistently wrong is actually pretty impressive, and there are worthwhile lessons from watching someone getting taken seriously despite being wrong. Maybe you could revisit them with that approach.

Dead Internet Theory seems the new iteration... not finite in extent but in novelty maybe, a small mirror maze with infinite reflections on a very small set of themes.

I still don't understand what happened to stumbledupon. That was INTERNET! for me.

Card's idea that everyone could publish and excellent voices would be amplified was correct in premise, though it's conclusion was completely off. Classic XKCD parodied it brilliantly IMHO: https://xkcd.com/635/

I really like Neal Stephenson's neologism 'amistics' - referring to which technologies a culture knows about but chooses not to use.

I really don't agree with this argument because copying and learning are so distinct. If I write in a famous author's style style and try to pass my work off as theirs, everyone agrees that's unethical. But if I just read a lot of their work and get a sense of what works and doesn't in fiction, then use that learning to write fiction in the same genre, everyone agrees that my learning from a better author is fair game. Pretty sure that's the case even if my work cuts into their sales despite being inferior.

The argument seems to be that it's different when the learner is a machine rather than a human, and I can sort of see the 'if everyone did it' argument for making that distinction. But even if we take for granted that a human should be allowed to learn from prior art and a machine shouldn't, this just guarantees an arms race for machines better impersonating humans, and that also ends in a terrible place if everyone does it.

If there's an aspect I haven't considered here I'd certainly welcome some food for thought. I am getting seriously exasperated at the ratio of pathos to logos and ethos on this subject and would really welcome seeing some appeals to logic or ethics, even if they disagree with my position.

I wonder whether it's a nostalgia thing. People rode in these trucks and saw senior guys they admired owning them when they were young and on the make, and now they think that's the kind of truck successful people own even if it's not necessary for their own workday.

I saw (and rode in) a lot of them in Alberta (Canada's Texas). Typical day for a work truck:

-owner starts you up from the hotel parking lot

-3-5 guys get in, you get your morning coffee via a drive through

-You pick up a 'slip tank' of diesel (think a metal box with its own fuel pump that sits in the bed and holds about a ton of liquid when full). You might fill up your own tank at the same time, typically on the employer's dime.

-you drive 1-3 hours over dirt roads and ice to get to the work site

-you fill up the heavy equipment from your slip tank, then stand for about 10 hours - you might be idling for part of that depending on temperature

- you drive another 1-3 hours back to the hotel parking lot. the owner plugs in your block heater so your fuel doesn't solidify overnight and you get ready to do it again the next day.

Trucks look impractical when they're getting groceries in the city, but everything about them - the height, the large cabs, all of it - is highly optimized for a particular kind of job. It might not be as common a job as it was when this design rose to prominence, I have no insight as to that, but there is a reason for everything about them being the way it is.

I can't think what the issue would be aside from range. One thing that stood out to me about the cybertruck is that they made huge tradeoffs to make it more aerodynamic. The only reason to do that is to increase maximum driving distance. Put a big blocky trailer behind it and suddenly the battery's maximum distance is competing with a gas tank on a much more even playing field. Regenerative braking would make up for some of that in very hilly terrain, but on level ground it just can't get out to as many of the remote areas people take their trucks to.

I really think the first obvious use case (aside from bugout vehicles) would be something like the early road rangers - driving all over a farm and bringing back crates of produce from muddy fields without getting stuck or needing a lot of maintenance.

I'm working on a collection of mnemonic images for learning written Chinese. Each has a solarpunk-style image referencing both the character's meaning and pictographic etymology, with the character overlaid and color-coded to indicate the tonality in Mandarin.

While I'm talking about it, do the folks here have any suggestions where I should make it available? I want it to be a free educational resource for whoever might want it.

Maybe it's just the similarity in appearance and cause of death to Carradign and Epstein making me see patterns that aren't there, but I cannot watch a Bourdain clip without getting the sense something is deeply wrong.

Talking about why one feels a particular way requires trust in the interlocutor, so I'm not surprised outsiders don't hear anyone taking about it. As for insiders, is it a given they aren't?

It's often better to segregate creative and inhibitive systems even if you need the inhibitive systems to produce a finished work. There's a (probably apocryphal) conversation between George RR Martin and Stephen King that goes something like:

GRRM: How do you write so many books?... Don't you ever spend hours staring at the page, agonizing over which of two words to use, and asking 'am I actually any good at this?'

SK: Of course! But not when I'm writing.

I have a DVD set of old UFC events - I think UFC 1 to 84 or something - and I remember in one very early event in Japan the commentators talk about how silently focused the crowd is. Of course, some people do find Japanese culture extremely creepy, but many would say the same of ancient Rome.

I wouldn't actually expect to see those norms in Roman culture, given how Latin is naturally a very flowing language and I've never heard of Romans valuing silence like the Spartans (or Japanese for that matter). But I wouldn't consider it particularly strange either - to me, making noise during a tense, violent event seems far stranger.

I think by including those, the author is saying that we tend to think that what is best for us (this tool is great/awful for my work) is also best for everyone else. It might also be a case of 'I understand this tool better/worse than others so if it's adopted I'll become more/less important' but that's a little more of a conscious thought process than what I think the article is pointing towards.

I also think the whole thing is written in a deliberately accusatory tone to provoke discussion among the target audience - rather than say that 'the ego wants to be at the center' the author could just as well have said 'our model of what other people know skews to be too similar to what we ourselves know'.

Dialect formation is also an instinct when forming close connections with any group of people. The prevalence of acronyms in workplaces is probably due in larger part to collective rather than individual ego formation.

Since you said you're genuinely curious - the answer to your first question is no. I'm grateful for what diversity and creativity does exist - and I recognize that even with public schools in the mix, it's more than what existed for most of human history. But public schools have certainly been a retarding force in the generally positive developments we've seen since my grandfathers' time.

Incidentally, they're only a little bit older than that, so we shouldn't pretend they're some deeply tested social technology.

North Vietnam's leaders were. So was Iran's.

not the school administration, other students.

You're tempting me to start doing just that. Maybe focus on keeping the conversation productive in keeping with HN's community guidelines.

The trouble I have with this line of argument is that, at least for male children, the skills one learns for dealing with 'problem' people in school (IE skills one would learn in an MMA gym) are not relevant for dealing with problem people afterwards.

I saw a study a while back - don't have the link handy - that while homeschooled kids of all ethnicities showed improved education outcomes compared to their public-school counterparts, African American kids improved the most. Not really surprising if they would otherwise be going to the worst schools!

I can give a very simple example - in my high school history class, the cold war was presented as a conflict between communism and democracy - despite the fact that on an economic field the conflict was clearly between communism and capitalism, while on a political field proponents of both systems were happy to subvert the democratic process whenever someone had the audacity to vote for the wrong economic system.

Ooh, as I was typing I thought of a better example - remember the four food groups? eight to twelve servings of grains per day? Less obviously propaganda, though I'd argue the farm lobbies pushing it count. But harms in terms of its link to obesity and heart disease are pretty damn stark.

Given that school children are a huge captive audience of future consumers/voters/employees it would be incredibly strange if the curriculum wasn't the target of all kinds of special interest groups that aren't perfectly aligned with public interest.

"In study after study, the homeschooled have scored, on average, at the 65th to 80th percentile on standardized academic achievement tests in the United States and Canada, compared to the public school average of the 50th percentile."[1]

"Descriptive analysis reveals homeschool students possess higher ACT scores, grade point averages (GPAs) and graduation rates when compared to traditionally-educated students."[2]

[1]https://www.educacaodomiciliar.fe.unicamp.br/sites/www.educa...

[2]https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ893891