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I feel like there’s a natural adoption curve to social media:

1. The growing social media platform balances the needs of two user groups: the consumer’s need for fresh content and the neophyte producer’s need for a slowly ramping trickle of validation. This is possible because the people don’t know how to produce content in the new format yet.

2. The mature social media platform has picked winners. We know who the successful youtubers are, the successful twitch streamers, etc., and they know how to create the optimal media for their platform. At this point we’re maximally satisfying consumer demand, but we’re actively repelling the neophyte producers because the bar is now too high. They form a growing untapped market for the next social media platform.

3. Decay. A competing platform has stolen the limelight by restoring the dynamism of the consumer/producer balance. The successful producers of the platform start flexing out to the new upstart, though they’re unlikely to repeat their successes there, they’re too late to the game and bound to old habits. Chasing feature parity with the new platform does nothing because now you’re just upsetting the existing balance but that’s not suddenly going to pull new people into the game, they’ve already written you off.

I actually wouldn't be surprised if it did have a direct VLF antenna system. If the Dead Hand had triggered, that suggests multiple Soviet C&C headquarters went offline due to a first strike, and at that point you can't really assume your repeaters or silos are still online. The submarine fleet's primary purpose is to be the surviving second strike capacity.

Historically, I think the answer is even scarier: the Dead Hand system presupposes that a centralized power is necessary to start nuclear war, the American system has been to delegate that power to regional and even theater-level military commanders (particularly in the bomber days, when sending orders to the Pacific theater was never going to work in the necessary timescale). It makes sense from a game theory perspective--if the commander-in-chief was literally the only person with strategic command authority, an assassination could render the entire country vulnerable to an unopposed first strike.

An airfield on the northern edge of Japan is close enough to Russian airspace that, at alert, the local airfield commander was going to have to make the call to sortie their bombers while the runways were still intact, and once deployed it wasn't unimaginable that a Dr. Strangelove-style scenario could go down.

It's been a few years, but I think this was mostly detailed in The Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg.

The most consequential recipient of said orders is going to be a ballistic nuclear submarine deep underwater, and water is a terrific shield for the higher frequency radio bands a satellite will have access to. I'm guessing the command rocket will spool out an extremely long wire on its flight trajectory and give access to the VLF or ULF radio bands that can penetrate the ocean.

I recall hearing a hypothesis that one consequence of global warming might be an uptick in opportunistic fungal infections. Warm-bloodedness might be largely an adaptation to make the human body uninhibitable by environmental pathogens, but as warming pushes tropical areas to long sustained stretches of temperatures above 98.6F, it acts a selective pressure for organisms to evolve such that they can now thrive in the body.

I suspect their primary advantage remains shelf-stability at room temperatures, which will make them stay relevant for military applications, e.g. you don't want a cryogenics facility in your submarine or cruise missile launch platform.

Historically, I think they're cheaper than an equivalent disposable liquid fueled engine but don't hold up to the fully reusable designs of today, and from a reliability perspective there's not a lot of room between working-as-intended and "activate the flight termination system" at a total loss.

That’s totally fair—I was thinking more like a small nation-state being able to leverage a relatively small enrichment program rather than a private independent program.

I’m sure there’s all sorts of experimentally determined magic numbers that are only discoverable with testing.

I find the proliferation concerns of this technology to be rather scary--if LLNL could cobble this together in a few rush months with slide rules back in the late 50s, what could an adversary with modern computational fluid dynamics and a pile of GPUs do?

With this sort of design, you could scale a fairly small amount of fissile material into arbitrarily large outputs adding basically just lithium deuteride.

Not quite--a conventional thermonuclear weapon uses a "tamper" surrounding the secondary, essentially a cylinder of uranium that's designed to eat the spike of x-rays coming off the primary and convert it into a compressive force by ablating away on the exterior. This compressive force generates the pressures necessary to drive the fusion reaction (and is potentially fissile itself, if you use enriched material). It's physically heavy, and bringing that mass to speed requires a pretty powerful primary relative to the overall yield.

It seems that the conjectured Ripple design uses some sort of wave-shaping barrier between the primary and secondary to convert the single massive spike of x-rays into a series of pressure waves that, via constructive interference, are able to compress the secondary directly without the need for the intervening tamper.

Being able to do direct compression this way means you can do away with the weight of the tamper, and since you're applying the force directly you can get away with a much smaller primary (e.g. a 15MT device with a 15kT primary gives you a 99.99% "clean" design).

Still requires the primary though.

> What is actually different?

They are the other party--a market maker isn't (outside of the "designated market makers" I referenced earlier) a special participant in trading, they're just like you or me.

If I put a limit order in to buy at 3332.95, and someone takes it, I now have one stock. If I put in a limit order to sell at 3333.05, I sell that stock and make a dime. In aggregate, if I'm doing that many many times, and the price stays roughly around 3333, I'm making a dime on every round trip.

A "market maker" just means that I don't really care about investing or speculating, all I'm really in for is to collect that dime on the round-trip and sit at the bid/ask spread.

> Also are you saying that the market maker dictates the bid ask spread and not the highest bidder/lowest seller

No, as you've said, the highest bidder/lowest seller set the bid/ask spread. It's just, in any high volume market, chances are the incidental traders that want to improve the best offer clear very quickly--at any given point the market is probably going to clear until you hit the market makers. By definition, they're the folks willing to wait it out.

That said, market makers can compete with each other--if you are more ambitious than your competition, you might be willing to improve (narrow the spread) on your competitors. You'll make money by filling trades that they will miss out, but on the other hand, you're getting less spread and less profit per-trade. If that lower profit doesn't cover the statistical risk of losses from price movements, then you won't be profitable. The bid/ask spread narrows or widens based on the interactions of all market participants, just, if a particular instrument looks very risky, the market makers, acting as backstops, might want more money in the form of spread to warrant trading.

In practice, the most liquid instrument in the market these days trade pretty close to the minimum spread all of the time--high-frequency market makers are very efficient and so you rarely have to pay more than a penny to cross the spread. As a result, it's also not terribly profitable to make markets, since you're only earning a penny per round-trip for the risk you have to take.

(Compared to say, real estate, where the "bid/ask spread" is basically unknown and has to be discovered through the very expensive agent mechanism.)

Here's my understanding, starting with some background terminology:

Everything that's tradable on an exchange (an "instrument") has a bid/ask spread that represents the highest price someone's willing to pay to buy (the bid), and the lowest price that someone's willing to pay to sell (the ask). There is _always_ a bid/ask spread, because as soon as anyone places an order that would reduce the spread to zero, that means they're willing to pay what someone's asking, or vice-versa, and therefore the exchange immediately converts it into a trade--done deal!--and now there's a spread again. Incidentally, executing a trade this way is "crossing the spread", you're opting to "pay the difference" between the bid and ask to get your trade done.

Someone that crosses the spread is said to be "taking liquidity." They're willing to pay the surcharge of the bid/ask spread to get their trade executed right now. On the other hand, someone that sits at the bid/ask spread, waiting for someone to cross to execute, is said to be "offering liquidity," they're willing to patiently wait in order to save money equal to the spread.

Now, a market maker is a participant that is _solely_ interested in making money off that bid/ask spread, basically like a sports bookie. They're willing to always be in the market, on both sides, and take the spread whenever someone crosses over. So if say AMZN is trading at 3332.95 x 3333.05, they'll be offering to buy at 3332.95, and sell at 3333.05, and any time people take those offers, they make a dime. Do this thousands of times a day, on many different instruments, and you've got a business. That said, there's real risks in market making, and understanding them requires the idea of "informed" versus "uninformed" trading.

An uninformed trader comes to the market simply because they want to trade for some external goal unrelated to trading. Maybe they're selling stock for a house downpayment, or buying agricultural futures because they make potato chips and don't want to deal with the price shocks of a sudden drought. They're willing to cross the spread, and they don't particularly care if they lose a few pennies on the transaction, because that's not their goal. These traders are the meat and potatoes for market makers, because they don't move the fundamental price of the instrument, they're effectively noise. In a market of nothing but uninformed traders, you would expect your position as a market maker to fluctuate around zero, because you're buying roughly as much as you're selling.

An informed trader, on the other hand, "knows something". They're aware of some material fact (or at least a strong hypothesis) that indicates the price of the instrument is going to move dramatically in the near future. They're willing to cross the spread, because they know the spread is going to move with them anyway. These are danger for market makers, because they will all pile in on one side of the trade, all buying, or all selling, and now the market maker will end up in a losing position--short when the price is going up, or long when the price is going down.

Imagine running a Gamestop store: on a normal day, you might see half your customers buying a PS4 and half selling a PS4, but on the day that the PS5 is announced, suddenly everyone wants to sell their PS4 at the same time before you lower what you're offering.

The classic market maker algorithm looks at "inventory", basically your absolute outstanding position, and tries to keep inventory as low as possible. When uninformed trading is taking place, your inventory is around zero, and you can stay very close to the minimum spread. As your inventory grows, and you become either increasingly more long or short, you start pulling your bids or asks away from the best bid/ask to try and bias future trades back into a 50/50 ratio. All market makers doing this simultaneously means the bid/ask spread starts to widen as there's increased uncertainty about the price.

Another key element to market making comes down to trade volumes. You could, today, start market making, all you need to do is put in limit orders at the bid and ask and wait. However, you'd probably not make that much, because you're losing money to various trading commissions, exchange fees, roundtrip network latency, etc. Professional market makers make tens of thousands of automated trades in a day, and as a result, are able to negotiate substantially lower costs that make it worth doing. Many exchanges even have "designated market makers" that have special trading permissions in exchange for guaranteeing that they will _always_ provide some best bid/ask offer even in the worst case conditions, otherwise you in a sufficiently large event you could get a "liquidity crisis" (i.e. there's no one willing to buy or sell that instrument at any price).

That ended up being more text than I thought it would--apologies.

I wonder if this problem flows both ways. I suspect that at least housing and school (or the overlap, housing in good school districts) is to some degree a zero-sum game whose costs are set at the margins.

In tech metros, where those marginal market-clearing prices are set by those tech salaries, it makes sense that they would settle at precisely the point where they're no longer quite comfortable to the average tech worker. Otherwise, what's to stop you from paying a bit more for that house than the second best offer?

I wonder if there are learnings from this that could be transposed into the 1-D domain for audio; as far as I know, aliasing is a frequent challenge when using deep learning methods for audio (e.g. simulating non-linear circuits for guitar amps).

There's a nuance here: it's possible to both want systemic change on the macro scale, but also meanwhile seek a local maximum for oneself given the current system dynamics at play.

By proxy, I might advocate that income inequality is too high, and that some form of wealth redistribution should be considered. You might say that, therefore, I ought to donate my entire salary to charities. Someone might do that, as a radical stand against capitalism, and I would support that. However, I would also support someone that is trying to seek better wages under the current system, even if they do support wealth redistribution on the wider political scale--in context, it's understandable.

Translating that back to the original space, it seems that you advocate that someone that might today identify as a trans woman might instead identify as a man (or person) with phenotypically female presentation, due to medical treatment, and with a significant number of traditionally feminine attributes, as 'personal characteristics shouldn't matter'. This would place them in the vanguard of challenging gender dynamics. I think that's admirable of people that choose to do that. I understand that many other trans folk want to challenge the status quo less severely, and identifying as their gender allows them increased safety, sanity, and happiness within the confines of the current world.

That’s a great callout as well: it’s optimal for maximizing your expected growth in the long term, but does carry significant volatility. That’s fine for an emotionless immortal robot investor, but as we’re human.

If we’re close to an investment goal, like saving a house downpayment or retiring, the calculus is quite different. Even outside that, loss aversion is a real thing and we’re likely happier trading some upside for being able to sleep at night.

It's useful as an upper limit--if you're leveraging past what Kelly suggests you're almost certainly overleveraged.

In theory, Kelly is optimal--if you knew the exact probability density function of your returns, it would give you the right leverage to take.

In practice, you're always playing with risks, some you're factoring into your models, some you're choosing not to because they're intractable, some you're not even aware of until they occur. The most basic premise--today's returns will be a function of hypotheses that I've derived from looking at past observations--is an approximation at best.

This mismatch between model and reality can lead to expensive lessons learned when using the full Kelly model, so often traders will "half-kelly" or something like that, to incorporate the basic idea of risk scaling proposed by the Kelly model but with more safety margin.

I wonder if you could build some sort of deliberate reflector into a microphone housing to generate comb filtering that an analytic technique (or ML) could derive spatial data from. I know in the limit this is possible, since there's dummies used for binaural recording or testing earbuds, but could an intentionally designed mechanism accomplish the same thing in a smaller package?

It'd be neat if you could then encode the spatial information and use an HRTF on the destination receiver to appropriately place the sound in the listener's soundstage.

I always find these orphaned technological branches compelling, in part, because it's so easy to point to the success story and treat it like it was a singular invention. We hold up the iPhone as a miracle but forget the Newton and PalmPilot.

It's a good antidote to the narrative that either an idea is sufficient for success, or that success is a function of the idea. It's important, sure, but a fair bit of it is having the timing, resources, and luck to throw ideas against the wall until the world is ready for it, either due to cultural factors, missing infrastructure now built out, or other underlying technological evolutions meeting up together.

I agree with you 100% that "side projects as an antidote for burning out on your primary job" is a dangerous place to be, and I've been there several times in my career with deleterious effects. I agree with your recommendation to take that as a warning flag and instead change your job, that is the right call in that situation.

On the other hand, I do find a lot of enjoyment in fields that, today, are dominated by "winner takes all" dynamics and extremely low probabilities of (financial) success (e.g. most creative fields). I don't mind diversifying my time between a primary job that, while not burnout-land, is also a bit boring and reliable, and a secondary that, while incredibly unlikely to "strike gold", is rejuvenating of my creative energies. I do have to be careful that it does not drift into the maladaption that you note though.

I think there's always inherent tradeoffs to specialization vs. generalization, and side projects/side hustles are more of a generalization technique. It feels rather akin to the "exploration vs exploitation" tradeoff in AI; do you search the space for better opportunities, or maximally refine the opportunity you have?

Specialization is great, if the specialty you choose ends up being important or highly in-demand. For example, everyone wants to be the Geoffrey Hinton of the 21st century, a luminary in deep learning. Not too many people want to be the Geoffrey Hinton of 1986, publishing back-propagation into an AI winter and subsequent decades-long disinterest. It's hard to know which one you'll be (or in the above, both!)

Side projects and hustles allow you to broaden your toolbox and see potentially interesting crossovers. "It's like [X] for [Y]!" is a cliche startup pitch at this point, but it's true that a lot of cool ideas arise from applying principles of one field in a widely disparate area.

I don't think that it's particularly wrong to choose one route or the other--I admire the specialists I know, even as I know that's not something I can replicate. I'm too enamored of the possibilities, and cognizant of the brevity of my lifespan, to be able to commit like that.

As someone adjacent to this role, a lot of the time this sort of "hands off" behavior is incentivized; the reason the principal is not jumping in and taking point on making the final decision and implementing is because that severely reduces the agency and ownership of the senior devs below them (and in many companies risk undercutting the latter's career progression, if it depends on them showing that independent ownership).

I feel like they're one of the only tools we have collectively as a society to counteract "tragedy of the commons"/negative externality situations. Is a tax that brings the financial costs of an action in line with its distributed societal costs that unethical?

I suspect a lot of this sort of illiquid asset inflation is a bid to cache wealth in difficult to track forms. The last decade of interest-rate-driven income inequality has turned into a corresponding wealth inequality, but some combination of inflation and leftist swings in the government could threaten that wealth.

Remember Terminator 2, where a prepper Sarah Connor had a shipping container of guns buried in the desert? A smattering of fancy houses in politically disparate jurisdictions stuffed with art and sealed copies of SMB might be the modern upper class equivalent.

While I agree that an individual should look at it as a lottery ticket, as a society we should be careful about macro trends towards new lotteries.

Many big tech companies arise from disintermediation plays--finding some market that has high overhead and figuring out a way to transact it more cheaply. This is great: it lowers barriers to entry and liberates a new surplus, but it's not clear who then captures this new surplus, the market participants or the marketplace?

I would posit that the lottery system is a mechanism to enable the excess surplus to be siphoned away from the market participants towards the marketplace. Humans are _terrible_ at estimating the expected value of low-probability high-impact events, and dangling a few rags-to-riches stories lets your participants imagine they're going to make it. In reality, it bifurcates the market and drops the median outcome (presumably, this surplus is captured by the transaction fees of the marketplace).

As an example where this could play out, I might look at restaurants--if delivery apps and shadow kitchens lower the clearing costs for me to find a dinner, does that then mean the "best" restaurant in town can now scale up, to the detriment of the second or third best? (On the other hand, the physical limitations make this story a harder sell than purely digital goods.)

I feel like there's two different skill-sets at play--the ability to learn a piece, as printed, and play it back accurately, and then this, which is more improvisational skills. The two skill sets intertwine but mastery of one does not necessarily transfer.

To learn the latter quickly, I find it easiest to build a catalogue of music you like listening to, and then figure out how to transcribe it (by ear) on your piano. Maybe just the most overt melody lines at first, before you can grok chords all that well.

In time, you start building your own internalized library of "licks", little musical gestures that are automatic, and to achieve what Marc is doing, is to just string those gestures together. It sounds musically complex but when you're doing it, it almost feels like cheating, because you're leaning so hard on these "tropes" that you've built up over time.

How do you disentangle the correlation, though?

Is it not also possible that a driven person retires because, perhaps subconsciously, they recognize symptoms that both impair their continued performance and portend their imminent demise?

Not necessarily true, as the effort to miniaturize the package size for use in ICBM warheads proceeded, they've successively reduced from the "soccerball" style of lenses in the trinity device down to only a handful (it is a design mandate that a bomb retains "one-point" safety in the event that it is detonated by an external source at a single point, but referencing Command and Control here, there have been flawed bomb designs that had a 15% chance of a 40kt yield in an accidental one-point detonation).

I was thinking if it would be feasible to implement an OpenCV-style facial recognition script that could require sustained attention from the user to preserve an open session on the computer. If that user stops watching the screen or is physically separated from the view of the camera, then the locking operation would take place automatically.

I'd be curious from a legal perspective if that would constitute obstruction if you always used it, by analogy to having a data destruction policy in place before the discovery phase of a lawsuit.

That wouldn't matter (at least as I understand the article explanation). There's 2^3 = 8 different stamp configurations, two of which (RRR/GGG) trivially have 100% match likelyhood. The other six are all equivalent, and they all predict the same thing. There's (3 choices of doors) * (3 choices of doors) = 9 ways to expose the stamp configuration, and in any of the six equivalent stamps there's five ways to match colors to four ways to differ, 5/9 = 55.55%, the expected distribution. [1]

The problem is that quantum mechanics predicts (and experiments show) that the distribution you actually get is 50%, which is lower than what you would expect no matter what stamp configuration you get.

On the other hand, it's possible that the way you choose which door to open is not distributed randomly. One of the ways to reconcile Bell's theorem is that there's a passport stamp that mind-controls you into picking doors with a 50% distribution. It's not a very popular theory, but it exists. [2]

[1] Assuming RGG without loss of generality

  1-R 1-R = Match
  1-R 2-G = Miss
  1-R 3-G = Miss
  2-G 1-R = Miss
  2-G 2-G = Match
  2-G 3-G = Match
  3-G 1-R = Miss
  3-G 2-G = Match
  3-G 3-G = Match

Five matches to four misses.

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism

The problem isn't solely in rendering fast enough--it's end-to-end latency. Keep in mind that if your eye is being tracked by a 120Hz camera, that's 1/120 =~ 8.3ms latency just from inter-frame time alone. Add to that all sorts of communication bus overhead, image processing the eye tracking imagery to figure out eye direction, potential buffering in the display adapter, 5ms is not really possible, yet.

That said, I don't think there's theoretical limitations that prevent extremely low latency systems from happening, it's just not something we've kept in mind when designing modern consumer hardware.