katmannthree

Everybody likes to imply that Elon is going to make some sort of shit new society in space. Perhaps they'll get as far as trying, but the odds of it working out are questionable on social grounds alone.

In general, people living in hostile environments develop higher levels of trust and social responsibility. When you live closely with people, where everyone's choices impact everyone else, when a single person intentionally screwing things up could doom the entire community, you get societies that are pretty much the polar opposite of the archetypal billionaire libertarian vision.

Dropbox has engineering issues in general.

Linux support is terrible, their app still doesn't support sync on demand and probably never will. The net effect of this is that people with a lot of data in their dropboxes (i.e. paying customers) get to choose between either losing huge amounts of drive space unnecessarily or just not syncing that folder at all.

One has to wonder if the reason they're not supporting Apple Silicon is a lack of technical ability rather than just a brain-dead organizational decision.

It's not, I just don't want to name them for reasons that should be obvious. There may or may not be enough info in my post to figure out what I'm talking about, you'll have to use your best judgement.

It's not just lambda. There's another bootcamp, lets call it crap college, which effectively asks their ~~customers~~, sorry, _students_ to work 10+ hours a day 6-7 days a week for months.

If you fail or withdraw, you have to pay back prorated tuition at the rate of several hundred dollars per day you were there. There is no grace period, if you get three days in and decide it's not for you then you owe them almost a thousand dollars.

Ever worse: their instructional material is very much lacking rigor, the degree of guidance they provide is far lower than you'd get at a community college (which would also be a lot cheaper), and the whole vibe of the community borders on cult-like toxic positivity (any criticism of the company will get you kicked out).

It's very close to predatory. They lure in disadvantaged people with promises of vastly improving their lives, but I'm betting a substantial percentage of them leave with thousands in debt and virtually nothing to show for it. And the best part? If you're dismissed or withdraw that nice easy-to-pay income share agreement goes away and you just owe them thousands effective immediately regardless of your financial situation.

It sounds like they're developing real tics because of subconscious influences from the tic-tacs, real fake tics which are more or less the same as real real tics just brought on for different reasons.

And regarding the music analogy: it's not about the person liking just the music from their formative years, it's that the music they're exposed to during those years has an outsized effect on their preferences going forward. If they pass an intuition check they'll eventually realize the _reason_ why they care so much about the specific technical details they do isn't because that music is inherently and objectively better, and if not then they'll spend the rest of their life complaining about how they just don't make 'em like that anymore.

It's not that they think that and then consciously act on the decision, just that it's the _reason_ they do it.

Much like how a certain type of person will very strongly defend their musical preferences with various technical reasons, while discounting that it just happens to be what was popular when they were a teenager.

Would these be the same developing countries where Facebook has helped facilitate genocide?

Seriously though, is the net utility of Facebook even positive there? It’s not like those businesses couldn’t interact with their customers over literally any other medium.

Can't help but feel that the world would be a slightly better place if it stayed this way.

> 5,000 word whining screed where the author carefully dodges addressing the obvious solution

> So what will we do?

What you do is you get the fucking vaccine. Sometimes you have to bend a little for the betterment of the society you inhabit, it's always surprising to see literate and otherwise-intelligent people who completely miss that.

They were used by the soviets for unmanned arctic lighthouses, but even the largest RTGs only put out a couple hundred watts of electrical power (a small fraction of what this vehicle would need).

Your first response is exactly why I asked that question. Most of the time, people who feel strongly about this topic struggle to find a rigorous definition which can actually be dissected.

> 2. The ability of a person to consciously observe, question and disobey what they feel. The degree in which a person is capable of this varies between different people and different circumstances.

And this of course raises the question of _where_ the choice to disobey feelings comes from, what factors are at play in that decision making process, and whether this process is even meaningfully different from just acting on your feelings.

Can you give a rigorous definition of what you think of as free will?

I think they had plenty of government bunkers, even if there weren't many personal ones. There are some pretty interesting videos of urban explorers going through them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKWFx0QAW2w

I believe he's commented on reddit that he likes how it's a memorable, funny name.

I'd side with Apple on this one, their lightning ports seem to be far more durable than USB-C ports.

Which are also a major pain to replace in both phones and laptops due to the pin count and general construction.

If you take it as a simple additive 2°C increase in temperature sure, if you instead trust the models predicting significantly more unstable weather on both ends of the temperature spectrum then not so much.

Wait what? What did I say that lead you to that conclusion?

I'm sure there were people in his time who would rightly consider him to be slower than they were (and equally sure that he wouldn't be acknowledging that if confronted about it).

My point is more that he had his own flaws, just like the people he had trouble getting along with. Being around slow people _is_ often frustrating, especially if you're more concerned with working than teaching. Was he an ass? Absolutely. But we should we try to understand_why_ he was, rather than just talk about how he should have been kicked out of society. Especially in von Neumann's case, where his net utility to society was insanely high (compare to, say, Mochizuki).

You could speculate to that effect, just as easily and correctly as you could speculate that he would have been even more productive still had he surrounded himself with people he didn't consider mentally slow.

> If you can't handle being around people that are differently abled from you then the answer is not to take your frustrations out on them.

Of course. But von Neumann was just as human as the people who struggled to keep up with him, he just had different weaknesses. Having low emotional intelligence is every bit as deserving of understanding as having low general intelligence.

> The answer is to stop being around people. No community/culture/society owes anyone, not even people at this level, some kind of pampered sphere of existence that revolves around them.

You sure about that? Society has MASSIVELY benefited from von Neumann's work. If the cost of that was a few people's hurt feelings at his inability to interact with them a way that doesn't hurt their feelings it was a small price to pay.

To be fair to one of those examples,

> von neumann would chew people out who couldn't keep up with him

Imagine what that experience was like from his perspective, constantly explaining simple things to people too lazy to put in the work necessary to have a proper discussion about whatever before ultimately wasting his time. Over and over and over again. That gets old quickly no matter what level you're operating on.

Per-programmer-hour I'd bet open source comes out on top, but overall it's basically impossible to compete with anyone with piles of cash.

If you have the bandwidth to contribute I'm sure the people working on the camera app (https://git.sr.ht/~martijnbraam/megapixels) would love any assistance you could give them on postprocessing the RAWs.

From my limited experience with it, there's a huge amount of focus lag on the sensor itself, massive shutter lag, and then several seconds of postprocessing lag. I'm sure the last two can be improved in software, although the phone's CPU is so slow I wouldn't expect anything remotely in the realm of Google's GCam computational photography magic.

It barely matters. The camera hardware and software lag like crazy and lack the postprocessing people are used to now -- the photos are terrible with a decent 5MP sensor and would probably be worse with the same weak CPU but more bits to shuffle...

The pinephone is great, in fact I'm typing this comment from mine.

That said, fair warning to anyone thinking about getting one: it's slow, buggy, and flat out unreliable if you need to be able to receive / answer calls and texts for anything important (e.g. work).

Once they get the software worked out over the next few years though, it'll be the best thing out there. No ads, no bullshit, just a phone with a mainline linux distribution.

As someone who has both a mid-range nokia released this year and an A13 iPhone I would love to see a side by side comparison video between your two devices showing camera and speed tests. From my experience it's the opposite, the nokia stutters and lags during normal usage while the iPhone loads apps almost instantly and doesn't drop frames.

Can it even be taught directly? All of the information needed to transition through the various stages is readily out there, the strength of intellectual curiosity necessary to push through the less than comfortable transitions is something that people seem to either have or not.

> It is there a risk of people faking meta-rationality?

I think that intentionally faking a level of psychological development is only possible in the opposite direction.

It's not.

Yes, the US. Virtually every large chain is doing it, even in the relatively remote area I live in. There's really no such thing as privacy here, too much money to be made tracking and selling to people.

Yes? I don't particularly care whether or not the grocery store knows exactly which products I buy, especially since it's moot with 1) the introduction of eye-level facial recognition cameras at every checkout lane and 2) paying with a card because I don't want to carry cash.

Interesting, could you expand on the issue with Brits and alcohol?