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That is by far the best approach… if you can do it. If your mind already works that way, you might not appreciate how much of a superpower you have.

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It might even be specific to Microsoft: once the make back the money they invested plus 100B, they are cut off. Maybe the original Intercept article has a better explanation, but it’s behind paywall.

In any case, I wouldn’t count on the deal remaining unaltered by the time they reach that, if they do.

I think what GP might be saying is that there is some risk associated with therapy (e.g. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/2020... —- not sure if it’s a good source but you can find plenty more with a search) and, if today we push therapy widely even for relatively minor issues, in those cases that would have fixed themselves with time it’s possible to get a negative outcome.

The deficit since October is roughly the same as all defense expenditures: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio... So even if they went to zero and didn’t have any effect on revenue, we’d still end up the year with debt ballooning. The lion share of expenditures are non-discretionary, and public debt increase is largely determined by demographics and interest rates.

Basically a “Michael’s peak” deep into the right part of the graph https://xkcd.com/323/? :)

Same. This is more someone made it big enough to build his childhood dream house than not what I would associate with the word McMansion. Now, if this is mostly architectural crap over standard American construction, that’s just terrifying, but even if so, the look, location, and price do put it in a different category imo.

About the same headline number as a $350 Xbox Series X! Although fp64 vs fp32 and Linpack vs peak.

Absorption is poor sublingually and is limited by https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_factor so I wouldn’t be surprised if most of those doses just get destroyed in the stomach

In part due to Alameda making it an attractive venue to trade on (at a loss) and other shenanigans though.

The molten metal is what radiates the IR

Everything is still down as of May 10th (since April 17th) without much info. Straight out of Mr. Robot.

There usually are reasons for real estate prices that you can’t know from basic stats.

Also about the point of being unaffordable, your first listing basically doubled since the last sale a few years ago, so in relative terms things aren’t looking too good. The second one’s estimate seems to have gone down recently, which tbh in this environment makes me think there is something very wrong with the house or the area and I would research the crap out of it before even considering looking at it.

Probably nobody knows for sure. I can say why I’m not bullish but it’s just a post hoc rationalization.

Tesla: general economic environment, stiffer competition and too many things piling up that will come “next year”, which will dry up one of their historical advantages (i.e. get paid now, deliver never). Probably some sell pressures from Musk cashing out for twitter and from a certain demographics of investors hit particularly this past year. On top of all that, Musk has been in the media too much and his true self started showing, alienating mostly potential customers and not making much inroads with the more conservative folks.

Meta: that just seems the nature of the space. Products are in and out within a few years, retaining mostly a certain demographic which grew up with them. They were able to stay relevant via good acquisitions, but were not able to do so for a couple of cycles now due to competition not interested in selling (Snapchat, TikTok). To accelerate the decline: general economic environment, privacy restrictions, and an expensive pivot to VR where the market seems way too small to support such valuations.

ChatGPT behaves like it’s either under examination and might as well say something with confidence, or it’s just been trained on a body of work written mostly by bullshitters. Would be nice if it just said it didn’t know some times.

There’s really no way to tell. If there is a hole and they broadcast that early, there will be a run and they are toast, so, like everyone else so far, they can only continue to service withdrawals until they no longer can. And up to that point, from the outside, things are identical with or without hole.

My experiences were so different from

> as Carvana was able to undercut its brick-and-mortar competition with vehicle prices.

that I’m not sure how to make sense of it.

Right before Covid I was shopping for a used car, and I remember their prices being outrageously higher than dealerships. I’m talking saving a few thousands dollars just by taking the dealer’s initial price without negotiating.

Similar scenario just a couple of months ago, I was looking to sell and again reading how well they pay I got a quote… and it was less than half of the first number a dealer threw out (this was a really old and cheap car tbf, I don’t expect it to be that bad for more expensive ones).

Either way, I always wondered how they possibly stayed in business, since it seemed weird that so many people would pay so much for the privilege of being ripped off a lot by some far away corporation, instead of having a person in front of you ripping you off a little.

I deeply hate the dealership experience, but the bad feeling/buyer’s remorse wears off in a couple of days and I’d rather enjoy the extra money in my pocket.

It’s very illuminating to me seeing the comments in this thread shedding some light into what people liked about Carvana and how they were being too generous with returns and losing money at scale. That makes some sense at least. But whenever articles talk about their good prices, it feels like a buried ad.

You can do that cheaply by picking up a pair of reading glasses, or glasses with lower power if you are already nearsighted. Roughly, infinity will be at 1/diopters in meters, so +0.5 glasses will make 2m away at infinity, +1.0 at 1m, and so on, and similarly if you are at -3, -2.5 will make 2m infinity, etc. It's not exact because they are not thin lenses and there is a separation between lens and eye, but it should be pretty close.

I've been using one less diopter correction for a while most of the time, with an additional pair of glasses with the full prescription for driving. Not sure if it does anything or my nearsightedness just naturally stopped progressing though, but since it's working and not bothering me I have no interest in finding out.

Maybe it's just too early in the morning, but I don't get it. What are we looking at?

With a long enough time horizon, the GP consideration ("If we continue to grow GDP (~energy consumption) at about 1%/y, we’ll boil oceans in 400 years.") will still come true even if expanding in space. A sphere expanding around earth at the speed of light grows quadratically in the outer boundary and cubically in volume, and will be overcome eventually by any exponent > 1.

I'm pretty convinced that increasing human activity so much to increase the background radiation to 373K is never going to happen, the point is more that any exponential energy growth eventually can't continue.

In a way though it's already happening, the GDP ~ energy consumption equivalence from the GP assumption does not hold (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.GDP.PUSE.KO.PP). We'll just keep inventing ways for the GDP number to keep growing exponentially in questionable ways for the system to keep going, until we can't anymore.

The same could be said about the invasion in the first place though, after the worsening from 2014, even if they managed to pull off the initial plan.

It seems more of a response/warning to the sending of weapons that has a tiny bit of teeth but not enough to escalate further.

>That's kind of wrong re Kurzweil. > >- He's always predicted the singularity for 2045 - no post moving there.

Fair enough. I've really only read "The age of spiritual machines" for an English class in college, and we went over it pretty in depth. It was fascinating initially, but after realizing that (IMO) it was mostly BS I have not read any of his stuff talking about the singularity after that book. So if he is sticking with his date good for him, but it seems pretty crazy to believe it's still going to happen if all the technologies that are meant to get us there are suffering setbacks.

I'm kind of right about the other two points though :) I found the book here: https://jimdo-storage.global.ssl.fastly.net/file/afff560e-b5... so it was fun to read back some of the things predicted about 2019.

> - He didn't say Moore's law - that graph you link starts from 1900, long before Moore and microchips

He postulates that there is a generalized law of accelerating returns that's universal. There were computational technologies before that reached their limits, and got overtaken by newer technologies that kept the overall exponential trend going. Moore's law was the latest of these computational technologies, ready to be overtaken once it runs out of steam. That's why that specific image spans times before and after Moore's law.

From page 81, he was pretty sure regular progress in semiconductors was going to get us very close to human processing power (20 Pflops in the book) in a personal computer by 2020:

"So, how will the Law of Accelerating Returns as applied to computation roll out in the decades beyond the demise of Moore's Law on Integrated Circuits by the year 2020? For the immediate future, Moore's Law will continue with ever smaller component geometries packing greater numbers of yet faster transistors on each chip. But as circuit dimensions reach near atomic sizes, undesirable quantum effects such as unwanted electron tunneling will produce unreliable results. Nonetheless, Moore's standard methodology will get very close to human processing power in a personal computer and beyond that in a supercomputer."

> - The graph says 10^10 flops for $1000 for 2020 approx, = 10 gflops. A NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 costs <$1000 and does 29.77 TFLOPS = 29,770 gflops so a good bit ahead of the prediction

From page 146 about 2019: "The computational capacity of a $4,000 computing device (in 1999 dollars) is approximately equal to the computational capability of the human brain (20 million billion calculations per second). [2] Of the total computing capacity of the human species (that is, all human brains) combined with the computing technology the species has created, more than 10 percent is nonhuman. [3]"

I get $4000 in 1999 to be ~$6850 in 2022 for 20 Pflops, so ~2.9 Tflops/$. So that prediction was 100x off (and with 3 extra years it should be >50 Pflops). Not sure if the graphs got adjusted later, but fwiw it looks closer to 10^15 than 10^10.

I agree with you: I think the model has been continuously breaking down from the beginning, and this is just a case of extreme goalpost moving. 20+ years ago, Kurzweil was very confident in Moore's law + Dennard scaling working to ~2020 and giving us 1 Teraflop/USD [0] but even with GPUs at nominal prices I think we are about 40x worse, with the gap growing.

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/PPTExpon... from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Spiritual_Machines

From the outside, Eric Schmidt basically put them on the current track and he long predates the acquisition. Most likely when the company was in its infancy and growing at high rates relied on cranking out products loved by all, it was easy to do the right thing/humor the founders (assuming they cared at least). At this stage though there is not much utility (as far as increasing ad revenue) in improving products, so its harder to hide what really mattered all along if they want to meet the growth expectations that the market/themselves have set.

They look interesting, but they are being discontinued with a few other product lines as intel refocuses their efforts. Do you know of other alternatives?

No, 1 performance + 4 efficiency cores. It feels like just adding up the count is a bit of a cheat though.

If this is accurate, they have last summer's SLC internship at $34/hr: https://www.levels.fyi/internships/Goldman-Sachs/Software-En...

Not bad in absolute terms, but even their NY/NJ offerings are half of what the top trading firms seem to offer, and middle of the pack for tech: https://www.levels.fyi/internships/

Good one! One thing that never sat right with me about CO2 sensors is that apparently they drift considerably, and automatically calibrate themselves relying on being exposed to 400 ppm on a regular basis, otherwise they might have lower readings than the real amount. Did you find it's easy to achieve that in a house, or do you need to be very deliberate about ventilation or periodically bringing the sensor outside?

Any implementation of memory that's ever existed uses measurable physical quantities/states to represent information, not the other way around. Also, (in classical mechanics to keep it simple) it all comes down to position, momentum, and fields. E.g "size" and "composition" is determined by the positions of particles, etc. So in a way the answer to where those properties are stored is right there.

If you don't think the universe can intrinsically have its own state, but it needs to be stored elsewhere, then there are a couple of issues. If this memory can only have the properties of the universe and no more, and can't be observed, it might as well not exist. If it has other possible states, then it's circular, and you'll need some memory one level up to store the state of the memory. So if you believe in nested simulations, I suppose your questions could be answered up to the "root" universe.

Whether there is some "external" memory that actually stores all the state in the universe is at least for now pure metaphysics. Do you think anyone on Earth could possibly answer this question today?