joshe

Strange that we sue companies for selling products we haven't even bothered to ban yet. The idea that 3M "knew the whole time" is kooky when we aren't even sure now, 15 years after people started looking into this, whether we should ban them.

Scientists, regulators and legislatures should decide what the rules are and then hold companies accountable for actually breaking the rules.

TLDR version: horses broadly used in the American west (like New Mexico) just 30 years after Spanish arrival (so 1520ish). Earlier guess was that it was much later, 1700ish coming from the east to west across North America.

Good context from the author of 1491 here, including the intricacies that required so much collaboration:

https://twitter.com/CharlesCMann/status/1641537159973707777

So? Bad lawyers do this too.

And like there is something OpenAI could do that wouldn't involve stopping cutting and pasting on every internet enabled device in the world?

There are a bunch of real problems to deal with, OpenAI should not spend a minute on this nothing problem.

This is like saying encyclopedias should stop kids from copying entries as their own work.

The verge is a GPT 3.0 level bot responding to the prompt "please generate a plausible sounding but fake problem with technology <x> that is alarmist and will wind people up who don't understand the technology well."

Week after week of silly fake alarm.

Not at all, trust it entirely on clear water. The UVC tech is very effective, they've got nice technical papers on it. And it's widely used for larger scale water treatment and very well understood.

If anything, the convenience is a factor in drinking more. It's so easy that I can do a bottle on a quick rest stop by a stream. I leave it handy so maybe 30 seconds to pull it out, and a minute for the uv to shine. (For muddy water it should be filtered enough first to make it clear, but I don't experience that.)

One tip I use is to not waste money is never be subscribed to any streaming platform.

So sign up for 1 month, cancel immediately and then watch what you wish for the month. Netflix used to be a pretty good deal because they had a depth of great old content from the major studios. But now it's scattered all over the other services, and we've all seen most of their decent original content.

Doing it this way I'm subscribed to Netflix 2 months a year. Apple for 1 month. Disney for 1 month. That's a difference of ~$40 a year vs ~$500 a year.

Don't stress that you'll want to watch it and can't. You can just sign up again. Even if you do it 5 months a year, you'll be way ahead. Just use the psychology that if you sign up you cancel immediately. Now the default is to save money.

Don't get drawn into the idea that this is a luxury that you can afford. Wasting money is not luxury.

Lots of people are mentioning UVC, Steripen https://www.amazon.com/SteriPen-Adventurer-Opti-Water-Purifi... has worked great for me for over 10 years. No funny taste and to me easier to use then the pump or squeeze filters. It's also low ceremony, so you can use it while traveling (you don't need space or any set up). I mostly use it for backpacking.

For academics I think this is fine, the whole job is to look for new extensions of the law. But it shows how very far we are from any kind of basis for "stopping tech."

Gonna be hard to achieve consensus around "raising fares and lowering driver pay" which is the opposite of what Uber did.

"Uber showed that venture predation works. Uber raised around $24 billion from private investors and used it to subsidize cheaper fares for riders and higher pay for drivers. Uber quickly crushed the taxi companies and acquired a dominant share of the combined taxi-and-ridehailing market.27 But it never developed a superior product or cost efficiency. Lyft, other ridehailing startups, and even taxi companies developed similar apps. Uber had to keep up its below-cost pricing to maintain its market share. In each of the three years before its IPO, Uber racked up losses of $3 billion or more.29 Uber reassured investors by explaining that, once it became dominant, it would be able to raise prices and recoup its losses. In its IPO roadshow, Uber’s executives told investors that they expected the company to earn an adjusted profit." ... "We concede that the “millennial lifestyle subsidy” was fun." ...

Then a lot of handwaving. But no victims other than bad high margin businesses. (There's a theoretical driver that doesn't realize the high pay won't last forever and buys a car, but he can sell it no? And he could read the news about his livelihood and learn that his high pay is at risk).

Btw, you can still take taxis. It'll cost more and pre uber they were very surly or wouldn't show when you called them. The only "regulate Uber" consequence will be higher ride costs and lower paid drivers.

Amazon operates on very tight margins in it's retail business. The ideal case is lots of competition, which would lead to uh... very tight margins among competitive firms. Amazon is just smart enough to get ahead of that. And I think their long term goal has been to operate at such a low cost structure that they have a durable advantage in cost. And then to pour back all their capital back into lowering their cost structure.

So why stop them? In order to subsidize the higher cost company, their private jets and sexual harassment lawsuits?

Capital is very easy to get in 2023. We are not in the time when capital is so difficult to get that you'd need a 2 generation family firm just to build a single factory. At that point spending 5 years to crush your competitor might have made sense. But now it's limited to monopoly markets like cable, and cell phone service. And it might indeed be useful to create more competition there.

Unlike Amazon I think Uber isn't likely to be a great business. There is just no cost structure advantage being built. So they'll either operate on low margins forever or they'll raise prices and we'll get competition in the space of a few years. In either case I would not want to hold Uber stock right now.

Congratulations on 30 years of not sucking!

Normal earphones don't have these restrictions. No one is making eardrum piercing earphones.

It would have been much better if they had just deregulated them right when congress told them to in 2017. Or even better the FDA could have allowed OTC 30 years ago.

Airpods are not regulated this way and they are much better engineered and more effective then even the best hearing aids.

We have squandered so many years of hearing for fantasy harms. For millions of people.

Congress actually passed a law in 2017 ordering them to sell them over the counter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-the-Counter_Hearing_Aid_A...

Like rain, interest rates raises fall on the just and the unjust alike.

It's still better to fly.

This might be the US version:

https://leanfactoryamerica.com/brand/green-frame/

The site mentioned "green frame" and googling found this, seems to be a licensor, since they have a brochure with "SUS" on it.

Looks cool, thanks for mentioning it.

The author lived in Japan

This, of course, is not how Stanford itself does it.

2020

https://stanforddaily.com/2020/07/29/stanford-to-lay-off-208...

2009

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna32660764

It's interest rates. Capital is becoming more expensive.

If you are a good CFO, you say:

"Hey remember how we want 5 years of cash, well i just looked at selling bonds and getting cash now is expensive." For tech companies the biggest expense is salaries, so saving cash means firing people.

For the smaller companies they aren't getting investments as easily or at all. They will also need to save cash.

The next few years are going to be different.

Interest rates: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=Z12V.

A million is just so many. I expected abuses, like "tell us about your uncle or we'll put you on the no fly list." So something like 50,000 people or so.

It was originally marketed as people directly involved with terrorism. "These are people who might blow up a plane." It's so much vastly bigger, it has to be some dumb trolling for data. Like lets add all the people who went to a mosque where a bad guy once went.

Here's a video of cars on the street in the Soviet Union in 1965. Lots of walkers and few drivers at mid day in a dense area of Moscow.

https://youtu.be/8uK5y8YjJTM?t=309

One from 1952, less of a big overview though.

https://youtu.be/J7UGpzhHIYQ?t=303

GDP per person in history always blows my mind. In 1949, UK gdp/person was $11,000. Lower than Brazil now at $14K. $11K is right where Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bosnia are today.

Communist countries like the Soviet Union or Poland were at $3K. The level of Kenya, Syria, and Nepal today. $1K poorer than Bangladesh now which comes in at $4k per person.

Just soviet union: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1073160/ussr-gdp-per-cap...

The rest: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2...

This is fun.

Would also be cool to generate commit messages while viewing history, it could really do a good job of orienting you. I'm imagining "human commit msg | gpt commit msg" so you can look at both. It's a little simplistic right now, kinda just describes the diff, but GPT-3.2 could rock.

It feels like an iceberg has been slowly turning over for the past 10 years, and is now flipping quickly.

Economic growth is now more correlated with carbon reduction than increase.

The useful work of preventing coal plants is over and we need to switch gears to get home appliances, ev cars, solar, wind and transmission out as quickly as possible. Environmental groups and common knowledge haven't caught up yet, but the fastest route to a low carbon future is a lot of factories producing ev cars, appliances, and batteries.

There are many zombie environmental groups that will continue to fight against anything humans try to change about the built environment, but over time the astonishingly good economics will move them to the side.

One of the nice thing is they don't really have much power other than stopping solar farms and stopping clean energy transmission. For 80% of the things we need to do, it's just people going to home depot.

And in many ways old school environmentalists are already losing the policy wars, the inflation reduction act is chock full of pro growth, pro abundance carbon reduction.

If you are looking for startup inspiration...

Super powerful battery augmented induction stove, hotter than gas: https://www.treehugger.com/impulse-electric-cooktop-gets-a-b...

In window heat pump 80% more efficient at heating and cooling. Helps with the big ticket/renter problem for heat pumps. https://www.gradientcomfort.com/

The coming abundance of energy...

Economic growth and solar: https://mobile.twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/157068814444987...

Solar economics: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-im-so-excited-about-so...

Mid term (2-5 years) it seems like it would be optimal for Twitter to leave SF. Downtown isn't that great to work in and the Elon hate is red hot. They could still keep their SF employees as a satellite office. Bailing on what is surely a very pricey lease is an attractive bonus :-).

Though, it would be hilarious if Twitter's no work from home policy lead to downtown revitalization :0).

I still think SF has a lot to offer startups, but it's no longer essential. Talent has scattered a bit and work from home will continue to drain people away.

Also you probably want to run content moderation from somewhere a little less lopsided ideology-wise. A little more normie like Salt Lake City, Phoenix, or Austin. Ideally a content moderator should be able to have a civil lunch with 80% of the country.

Which people?

I've been very reluctant to use their cloud solution as I trust Dropbox more for security. So I still fight 1password to keep the vault stored in Dropbox.

I figure there are maybe 4 organizations who are active enough to prevent a full download of all their user's data. Google, Dropbox, Amazon, and Facebook. (Maybe Apple, but they seem lethargic.)

Because they store all the passwords to all of our services they are a huge target.

Here's an even more dramatic one, https://www.google.com/finance/quote/GETR:NYSE?sa=X&ved=2ahU...

$10 a share to $0.96 in 2 weeks, 90% loss.

Would be cool to have Tesla's existing cameras collect photo snapshots for analysis. One of the few sources with the scope to ground truth maps at very low cost.

At low cost though, instrumenting uber or lyft cars would be interesting too. Or UPS/Fedex/Amazon vans.

It does seem that long term Europe should be segregated from the www.

For small entities Euro compliance is impossible. Say for Michigan's largest Mustang parts website. Euro's often respond this they would never bother and their targets are big tech, but illegal and not prosecuted is not the same as legal. And it is telling that the law doesn't say "this only applies to corps with more the 100 million in Euro revenue". It applies to all companies and individuals. It should be possible for such a site to "opt out of Europe" and have safe harbor.

And there is no way it makes sense for the whole world's web to be regulated by a Euro court. There is no reason for a user in the US to see GDPR banners.

Maybe a great firewall to id Europe users, and if you use a vpn to escape it US law doesn't recognize it as valid.

Can someone explain or point to something about what vite is?

Is this very niche or something every web developer should be interested in?

Tried this https://vitejs.dev/guide/why.html, and the comparisons page and it's all buzzwords.

"Vite aims to address these issues by leveraging new advancements in the ecosystem: the availability of native ES modules in the browser, and the rise of JavaScript tools written in compile-to-native languages."

Corp PR speak is not the pinnacle, there is no reason to emulate it. To "Address" a problem means you haven't solved it. "Leveraging" just means "using".

You can just send a signed pdf over email. Perfectly legal.

Macs even have a terrific signature attachment feature in Preview (the default pdf viewer).

Docusign etc. just add version tracking and document management, but you can just back up email. Even at some scale. Docusign is like buying a picture frame for a document like a diploma, it looks a more official but doesn't change anything.

More comprehensive info summarizing many studies on soil erosion worldwide is here: https://ourworldindata.org/soil-lifespans

The above is a vague sensationalized press release written by a PR flack at the university.