ketzo

The article seems to suggest that “liveness checks” are an effective counter to stolen selfies.

But aren’t all those checks just running against videos? Why can’t those videos also be stolen/mocked?

All in all: yikes.

I totally get it, I have that same contrarian instinct.

I have to reframe someone telling me "you should do X healthy thing" as "you should look into X healthy thing and see if it interests you/if there's really a good reason to do it", and then if I do my own research/reasoning, sometimes I can get my brain on board.

Basically, I have to trick myself into thinking it's my own idea. Very silly, but hey, it's how I started eating more vegetables and drinking more water, at least.

Are we really comparing a userland, unencrypted-at-rest SQLite database with Apple's app sandbox + secure enclave?

Corrupt government officers are one thing. But there is a ton of completely well-meaning bureaucracy in the U.S. (and everywhere!) that could benefit from a huge, huge step change in "ability to comprehend".

Bad actors will always exist but I think there's a LOT of genuine good to be done here!

And by "problem solved", of course, you mean "very large cost of living increases for the poorest 50% of the country"

Not even saying that you're wrong. But tariffs/onshoring don't exist in a vacuum. It's much more expensive to make anything in the U.S., and people do still want to buy things.

Yeah, and the writing of the post is very ChatGPT. Paragraph after paragraph of right-sounding words that offer absolutely zero insight once you get to the end.

It’s extremely beneficial to the people who are already doctors (dramatically increases salary, prestige, power), and that is a powerful group in most societies.

Okay, but how do you put that up as a writer?

Is it harder than the <5 minute Substack signup process?

Because if so, I think you’ve got your answer

You know, that’s actually a great way to look at it.

I think I feel like I can’t let myself excuse any slack, because I’m worried I’ll just start excusing everything — one day off at the gym becomes a week off, becomes a month off.

But I guess the point is that no matter how much you have failed, the toothbrush problem is always best served by you starting again tomorrow, no matter how many tomorrows it takes.

Literally all of his posts are like this. It’s crazy.

These two are more life-advice-y, but he also does some fairly deep dives on various problems he sees with scientific research (and psychology in particular), and his writing is no less entertaining.

In fact, one of his posts is actually about how he thinks scientists should make more effort to make their papers fun to read!

It’s fantastic, and I also hope to emulate it.

I frequently do this in Notion, especially in more brainstorm-y meetings. Also good for notetaking; I might be writing most of the notes, but then start talking more, and see someone jump in to take my place in the notes.

I really, really hate how many of my problems are toothbrushing problems. I know I just need to get over it and start brushing, but... ugh.

Anyway, can't recommend Adam's writing enough. Subscribed after his second post and have never regretted it. If you liked this, you should also read "You can't reach the brain through the ears", an excellent piece about failing to communicate.

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/you-cant-reach-the-br...

The thing that’s maybe most grim about this article is how much of a non-story this is. “New-media outlet can’t raise more VC funding, goes bust with no warning, leaves nothing but ashes” — yeah, it’s a Wednesday alright.

It’s obviously cliche at this point, but I do really worry about the future of publicly available, long-form writing. Investigative journalism in particular.

Oh my god the Barney thing has come up with every single group I've ever played that game with. Blew my mind the first time, then proceeded to blow everyone's minds every game after :D

(y'know, as much as one's mind can be blown by trivia about a children's tv show)

Fun (?) fact — because of this, some hospitals have prescription beer.

People always say this like a gotcha, but aren’t politicians supposed to do stuff that they think people will vote for?

Free market seems disastrous here. Most people hire an attorney… once? twice? in their entire lives, and the consequences of that person being incompetent could be life-altering.

There’s not a quick enough feedback loop here, I think. The vast, vast majority of people would not be “informed buyers,” so to speak.

The degree to which Apple has kinda just “won” laptops is nuts to me.

$999 for an 13-inch M2 Air is just bonkers. You can easily pay $1500, even $2000 for Windows laptops that are hotter, heavier, AND slower.

Object permanence (just from images/video) seems like a particularly hard problem for a super-smart prediction engine. Is it the old thing, or a new thing?

I think this is a good insight. But if the kid gets sufficiently good at guessing, does it matter anymore..?

I mean, at this point the question is so vague… maybe it’s kinda silly. But I do think that there’s some point of “good-at-guessing” that makes an LLM just as valuable as humans for most things, honestly.

I think he’s simultaneously acknowledging the wild unlikelihood of creationism, while also poking a little fun at himself with the irony of “of course I’m not wrong about this.”

I mean this is objectively the “best” way to get jobs. If it’s worked for you so far, I also imagine it’s probably gonna keep working.

Good to have a perspective that yeah, this is definitely very far on one end of the “fortunate/lucky” spectrum.

I think it’s a scale thing, honestly.

Yes, most reasonable adults remain reasonable even after fired

But once you hire a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand people… statistically there are gonna be some wackos you didn’t filter out!

It’s tough. I agree that treating each other like humans is the best policy.

Wow. Fascinating (and extremely important) edge case.

Out of curiosity, what led you to knowing this?

I think AirPods were post-Steve? And they were both widely mocked at launch and wildly successful.

Hey no kidding, some pretty insightful stuff in their more newsletter/blog-y posts. Their medical research is way over my head but also seems extremely cool.

Thanks for the rec!

I was gonna say "then why did China add so much coal last year", because I remembered reading that they added something like 50GW of coal, even as they added more than 150GW renewable.

But as of Jan 1 2024, they also had to introduce a financial incentive just to keep coal plants online, because otherwise the coal plants can't compete on price, just like you said! Some weird economics going on here, but it seems like China is still adding coal just to maximize total power deployed, even if it's uneconomic at the margins.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-guarantee-payments...

Yep, it definitely would. It doesn't mean we shouldn't still do it -- especially because richer folks tend to use more electricity and pollute more in general.

the CAISO website is super rad in general -- so many real-time charts!! demand trend is really cool to watch during heat waves; things get spiky on both the demand side (for obvious reason) and the supply side (peaker plants & "virtual" power plants coming online)

Honestly I think the whole "we are a startup search engine company who decided to spend the time to set up a production chain for t-shirts" is a worse use of resources than the actual money spent.