kaibee

Are... are you familiar with layoffs? Y'know, that thing companies do where they stop paying you and you don't have a job anymore?

Companies can issue new shares to dilute existing investors. I feel like on HN of all places, this should be common knowledge? Like, this is literally the scheme under which every tech company already operates, and yet on HN of all places some of ya'll can't conceive of a system where employees automatically get some stake in the business?

It would be straight forward to require companies over a certain size to issue and distribute some number of shares based on current pay to employees. Existing shareholders will have their stake diluted but are welcome to buy more shares on the market while employees are welcome to sell or hold. If the investors are actually good at allocating capital, they should have plenty of profits from previous investments to maintain their % ownership despite the share inflation. If they aren't, then they should find a different job.

Under this scheme, Bezos would still have become a billionaire, and we know this because Amazon and tech companies already do this exact thing by offering stock options!

And the neat thing is, when a company does a stock-buyback, this is literally the same giving a dividend of the profits to employees.

Not exactly the same thing, but I actually didn't expect this to work.

https://chatgpt.com/share/4298efbf-1c29-474a-b333-c6cc1a3ce3...

I dunno if this is the correct way of thinking about it, but I just imagine it as a particle that has mass but does not interact with other particles (except at big-bang like energy levels?). So essentially a galaxy would be full of these particles zipping around never colliding with anything. And over time, some/most of these particles would have stable orbits (as the ones in unstable orbits would have flown off by now) around the galactic core. And to an observer, it would look like a gravitational tractor ahead of the rest of the physical mass of the galaxy (which is slower because it is affected by things like friction and collisions?). And so you'd see galaxies where the arms are spinning faster than they should be?

> Given that quantum effects do exist, does this mean that the result of quantum activity is still just another physical input into the UAN

Yeah, it could be a spurious input though. My understanding is that quantum mechanics doesn't really matter at biological scale, and that kinda makes sense right? Like, if this whole claim about biology being reducible to the topology of the components of the network is true, then the first thing you'd do is try to evolve components that are robust to quantum noise or leverage it for some result (ie: one can imagine some binding site constructed in such a way that it requires a rare event that none-the-less actually has a very specific probability of occurring).

> and does not change the analysis of what the UAN computes? It seems difficult to think that what a UAN computes is not impacted by those lower level details (meaning specifically quantum effects, I'm not thinking of just alternate implementations).

What the UAN computes is impacted by those lower level details, but it is abstractable given enough simulation data.

ie, imagine if you had a perfect molecular scan of a modern CPU that detailed the position of every atom. While it would be neat to simulate it physically, for the purpose of analysis, you'd likely want to at least abstract it to the transistor level. The 'critical topology' is I guess, the highest possible level of abstraction before a CPU tester can tell your simulation from an atom-level simulation.

Now for CPUs, we designed that model first and then built the CPU. In biology, it evolved on the physical level, but still maps to a 'critical topology'.

There's a number of edge-case scenarios where you want a lot of height clearance above roadways. ie: hauling a wind turbine blade or rapidly converting to an airfield.

Stride game engine also exists and seems pretty ok. I've been trying to switch to it from Unity. Its C# based.

Talk to one and get something commissioned, then sign a contract about what copyrights you're acquiring from them. NFTs provide none of those.

Google bought Waze in 2013.

Its wholly possible for the universe to be teeming with single-celled life, but I think the jump to multicellular, intelligent, civilization, and space-faring (at least signals wise) could still cut it to a factor 1/1000 stars. And we're relatively early in the life of the universe still.

Is this some kind a humiliation fetish I'm too poor to understand?

Yeah, but you can't carry those with you.

> From a strictly mechanical point of view, the brain is a syncytium. While the electrical component of a spike that invades the synapse is chemically transformed into a vesicle message, the mechanical portion of the spike is transformed and propagated into and across the synapse in a way dictated by the mechanical impedance of the local membrane, cytoskeleton, and synaptic matrix.

I always hear that the brain doesn't do back-propagation the way that NNs are trained, but why are we so sure of that? This reads to me like a potential communication channel for doing backprop.

Desperate parents are well known for their medical expertise and cold logical calculus.

> Meanwhile some tab in browser measures CPU load or port saturation by doing some simple action, and capture every character you typed.

iirc browsers fuzz the precise timing of calls for exactly this reason already?

I would like to see how biologists explain the functioning of a computer.

That's fine, as long as its complex enough to keep us busy and nurse the ego :)

Once you have a large enough fleet of roughly the same shape, it starts to make sense to build some automated cleaning thing. I'm picturing like, a long tube with vacuum ports in it that can just be shoved in by a robot arm to vacuum each seat. Unless there's a wet mess, that'll basically get it 90% of the way there.

> I do wonder if there are such study cases of how people get used to a new UI/UX or completely different environments

I learned 3d modeling in 3ds Max as a kid, but many years and a CS degree later, I ended up switching to Blender because the license cost of 3ds Max was absolutely mental for a hobbyist ($3,000ish?). This was after the Blender renaissance where they overhauled their UI and stuff. But it wasn't my first time trying to switch to Blender from 3ds Max. In terms of features and workflow, both are very similar (and I actually like some things in Blender more), but it's the little differences that end up bugging you in my experience. Like some alt-mode of a feature being missing. Or the camera handling differently from how you're used to.

I'm currently going through this again now, switching from Unity to Stride game engine. At a quick glance, they're extremely similar, but that's almost worse. It's like coming home to your house and finding that it was replaced with an identical house.

> But would you rather be rich in a world of scarcity? Or middle class in a world of abundance?

I can tell you that many people would choose the first.

> Ukraine is literally doing it with rubberbands.

I'm under the impression that the supply-chain for Ukrainian drones basically leads to China in the same way that it does for Russia. For a "small" regional conflict, this isn't a problem to Ukraine because there's no way China could or would restrict supply of their cheap drones. But for a large-scale conflict, it would be a problem for the US to not be able to source drone motors by the 10,000's.

It's the other way around. RLHF is needed for the model to say "I don't know".

I think the military perspective at this point is that they want drones at all price points. Those 20-50k drones, I assume you mean like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZALA_Lancet and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136?

The cost estimates for those are quite wide, but in terms of raw materials even those low-cost prices are kind of absurd right? $20,000 for a few motors, batteries, basically a modern smartphone and 20-40 pounds of explosive? The military expects that they will get a lot cheaper, which means you need to be able to counter them at least as cheaply.

I don't see why. Drones are pretty simple manufacturing wise. The issue at scale is the supply chain of cheap motors, cheap control boards, and cheap batteries.

This is exactly the problem. The military needs single-use drones in high volume, and the production capacity/scale for that can only exist if it's subsidized by the consumer industry.

> You cannot compete with China even if we annexed Mexico for cheap labor in order to manufacture high volume low profit drones.

DJI isn't making drones by hand, they have automated factories. But its only worth building an automated factory if you're selling at a massive scale. Banning DJI drones in the US lets you build a factory in the US that can eventually get costs down.

And it's also dumb to fund your opponent's war production lines.

Is this true? It definitely sounds truthy and would confirm my biases. But I could just as well see:

1. Walmart opens location

2. Prices things to get a small margin

3. Competition is driven out because consumers don't want to go to multiple stores to get everything they need

4. Suppliers raise costs, inflation happens, market conditions change, etc. (it would even make sense for the supplier to raise prices if they have less independent customers, to account for the risk of only having 1 big customer)

5. Someone writes an article about how X is more expensive now at Walmart than it was at random shop, years ago.

LVT satisfies the categorical imperative. If I didn't know whether I'd be born as a landless serf (very high chance) or born to inherit wealth (low chance), then I should prefer to be born into a society with an LVT, since the LVT distributes the land rent to everyone.

> We still have huge amounts of extremely cheap land that could be made desirable with enough hard work. You can still buy a crazy amount of land in parts of the country for like $50k.

Land is made desirable mostly from what productive use it has. ie: being near jobs. There's not really any hard work any one individual can do to make some random plot of land in Kansas more valuable than its current market price.

> participate in local government to help protect the value of that land.

This is a nice euphemism for blocking new construction and restricting housing supply.

I inherited three properties. I pay a property management company to do everything on them, all I get is a regular check in the mail. Please explain how I have earned this?

On the bright side, I think getting the money-sending integration would be more politically viable, at which point we can just piggyback the messaging on top of it.