lsc

If I'm choosing to train up for job A or job B, I mean, money certainly isn't the only consideration, but it's certainly a very important consideration.

the era of supersonic travel?

I mean, sure, supersonic flight is /technically possible/ but it is exceedingly rare that the sound barrier is broken by traveling civilians.

My understanding is that the problem mostly has to do with air resistance increasing with the cube of speed; this could be overcome by going higher, above the atmosphere, but nobody has figured out how to do that at subsonic flight costs, either.

I mean, it is kind of sad; one of those technologies that we created, but that then turned out to not be as practical as the older stuff for everyday use.

Anyhow, I go up to the counter and rattle off everyone's order from my list. I'm making conversation with the person at the checkout, and mention I'm a vegitarian (I think sometimes it's a little like crossfit, in that regard) Anyhow, this person mentioned that burger king had vegiburgers, and they could make me one. Excited to have something other than just french fries, I accepted.

So I get back to the office and hand out the burgers. I go to dig into mine, and it's just a bun with way too much mayonase and some lettuce. It was so disappointing.

I'm not a vegitarian anymore, but I do still enjoy vegiburgers, so I will have to go try this out.

I've heard this before... and maybe I'm not qualified to speak, as I'm not yet the age where I really have to worry, but from what I know of current technology, I can totally go out and buy a walking speed electric wheelchair that is safe to operate even after my vision and attention degrade... but self-driving capabilities in cars are still quite some ways off.

Personally, my body would have to degrade a lot before I needed that wheelchair to make it a few blocks; but my attention and vision? that wouldn't have to degrade as much before I would not be able to safely operate a car.

This is actually something I've thought a lot about; I mean, I personally am bearish on self-driving cars, and if we don't get self-driving cars? I think I might need to plan on retiring to New York, as that's probably one of the few places I can count on aging without being expected to drive.

So, I'm not telling anyone else how to raise their children... but the fact that society has attitudes like this contributed to my own personal decision to not have any children of my own.

Playing every game your child plays seems... really excessive. I know when I was a child in the '80s and '90s, I had a lot of alone time on the computer, and got to explore a lot of things without my parents; I think it was good for me? I mean, unquestionably, it contributed to my income later on, but I think it might have been good for me in other ways, too?

I think it was probably good for my parents, too.

But then, I super want to reiterate that I am not telling others how to raise kids; I've worked with a few people who kept their kid with them almost 24x7, and that was what they wanted. And it seemed to work out ok? I've totally opted out of that whole thing. I'm just saying, I don't expect anyone to be with their kid 24x7.

Interestingly, for me? If I cut down to the point where my performance falls (closer to 40% for a few days) my hunger kind of goes away. Of course, I can't really work in that state (I'm aware some others can) so it's not really useful to me. If I want to lose weight while still working, it seems I need to experience that hunger.

One of the annoying things for me is that because this hunger is such a big part of my experience, I want to talk about it, and this... annoys almost everyone. Aside from people on the internet who want to insult you for not following their favorite fad diet, it's worse in person, because almost everyone I've talked to about it in person seems to think I'm telling them that they need to lose weight.

I think I can speak to this a little bit; I've taken four points off my BMI in the last year or year and a half or so, all through counting calories in and calories out... and I'd rate the experience as slightly easier than trying to breathe a little less.

The most annoying part was that everyone... fat people and skinny people would give me a hard time for actually tracking everything I ate. "Just eat less," they'd say, along with some advice about how they have a friend who lost weight on some fad diet that restricts not how much you can eat but what you can eat. I had a doctor who told me to take the sides I'd normally eat and cut them in half, you know, like I planned my meals or something.

For me? writing down what I ate was key; Obviously, (and this is likely the genetic part) some people have something that causes them to be not hungry anymore after they've eaten enough food. Whatever that is, it's obviously not working properly in me, or else I never would have gotten fat in the first place, so I need some external tracker to figure out if I've eaten enough.

(The other thing that seemed to be different about my experience than about most people's was that if I went a lot below my maintenance caloric intake, say, significantly more than 40% below for several days in a row, my work performance would collapse. If I tracked my caloric intake and kept it around 25% below what I burned, i was okay, though it was still difficult.)

I can only really talk about my own experience, but I think the paysa total comp numbers are close enough to throw rocks at the truth.

But, that doesn't mean I'm not curious.

I do think that there is a chicken and egg problem here, and it's part of why we think it's so important to keep poor people in their houses as the place gentrifies; A poor person growing up in a rich city has massively more economic mobility than they'd have growing up in a small town.

Of course, you are right that it's hard to be poor in a big city; but if you can snag a rent controlled room, or your aunt's couch or whatever, it can be a good leg up.

Are people who sued their employer a protected class in the USA, or is there some other reason why this isn't a career-ending event?

My personal opinion is that if you want to get approval to build an office building, part of that approval would be talking someone into building a similar number of housing units nearby. I mean, not that they should be owned by the same entity; most of us don't want our housing directly contingent on our employment, but you need to build offices and housing in sync, otherwise you get crazy traffic problems.

I mean, I personally think education is a great investment opportunity for the government; it's like those schools that give you an education and then take a bit of your income for a while, right? it seems like good free education would more than pay for itself.

But most people (or, at least most voting power) seem to disagree with me.

Depending on what I was buying the laptop for and the variety of batteries available, that seems totally reasonable.

I mean, not for the mac model of "you pay a lot extra but it works out of box, without having to make too many decisions" of course.

But if I was buying an expensive laptop 'cause it was powerful and customizable? yeah, it would be totally reasonable and even desirable to let me buy the battery I wanted; I'm a big fan of the old thinkpads, and they often come used with the giant battery that sticks out, which I dislike, because they make the laptop bigger and heaver. My buddy who is also a fan just bought a 'low profile' battery for his, which is even smaller and lighter than the regular battery I use.

I usually buy my desktops and servers entirely as parts, because I want to choose the parts I want.

But that's not really Apple's market. (of course, I do also have a non-pro macbook and an iphone; but in a lot of ways, I have different expectations for those than I have for my old thinkpads.)

>In that context, $20 might not be "that big if a deal", but it would be even less of a deal for Apple to just include that stuff, while also making for a generally more customer-friendly experience without making them feel like being nickle&dimed every step of the way.

right my point is that it's not the $20 that is the big deal there, it's the fact that you've gotta go order another thing, when you paid apple big money for it to work out of box.

However, it's a small thing, I think, compared to the cost of the mac laptops. If paying $20 for a cable is a big deal, then the macbook pro laptops and high end iphones are not for you.

I mean, sure, if it's likely you are going to spend your life making very little money, then sure, avoiding debt at the outset should be paramount. But getting some education, for most people, is probably the strongest thing they can do to decrease the chances that they will spend their life making very little money. I would argue that the next biggest thing you can do is to surround yourself with people who are going the direction you want to go.

I think the social and personal development sides of a metropolis are also pretty great. If I want to, (and I do) I can spend all day around people who are smarter than I am. I mean, substitute in your own figure of merit; no matter what you value, if you are in a dense area, chances are, you can find a group of people you can surround yourself with who have a lot of it.

This isn't just because of the migration of people who are financially able into the cities... this is also because there are more people of any type that are within your reach; there's a much larger and more diverse pool of people from which to pick your friends. If you are the average of the three people you spend the most time with? you want to be in a dense area where you can choose three really amazing people.

My own impresison, as someone who makes a good living without a degree, is that where you live actually matters a lot more if you don't have a degree; the difference in sysadmin jobs between silicon valley and less dense places is absolutely huge; much greater than the difference, say, in doctor jobs or even software engineer jobs.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MQGJ2AM/A/usb-c-to-lightn...

I mean, usb C has issues, but not being able to connect to an iphone isn't one of them.

You still need some kind of interface; like if I'm visualizing a picture and the computer can read it? even if you can do it, that's gonna require a lot of bits.

My point here is that having a direct brain interface still requires some sort of... interface, and you probably need a lot of bandwidth before the interface becomes better than... hands, at least for people who still have control over their hands. A low bit-rate direct brain output would be super useful for paralyzed people.

As an example for data in the other direction, cochlear hearing aids are absolutely amazing. But from what I understand? they are quite a bit worse than the ears most of us were born with. They are a long way from being an augment that people with already functional ears are likely to want.

I do think it's worthwhile to come up with new input/output methods; personally, I'd be super happy to shave my head and wear an EEG headset almost all the time, if it gave me output that was significantly faster and with less thought than typing. Heck, you might even get me on portability, if it's just better than a cellphone keyboard.

I'm just saying that there's no reason that a low bit-rate direct brain interface would be any more intuitive than fingers... I've been using my fingers for an awful long time, and to get me to switch to something else, I'm gonna need a better bit rate.

But personally, I think "higher risk" is a better descriptor of 'tech' than "Better executing" - by my definition, a tech company is applying new processes to their business that would not have been possible with older technology. That's a risky thing to do, and it can go badly and go well; It's easy to overestimate how useful a new technology is, or how much difficulty your traditional competitors will have competing with you.

(I mean, I'd totally read that, too)

But yeah, I really enjoyed reading Paradise Lost; I mean, I read everything on the kindle, but I think I need to find a nice bound edition that includes Dore's illustrations.

Oh hush, you. You know how much extra they're paying us because they have low profit expectations? Let the investors keep calling it tech.

But seriously, I think one could make a distinction between companies that focus on using new technology to scale businesses (which are mostly old, but can be scaled in new ways using technology) vs. old businesses that focus on just remaining old businesses. The idea being that if you are a "tech" company, you are rolling the dice on being able to expand much harder/faster than a company could have with older technology, and also have significant downside in that regard. To be a 'tech company' in this regard is to be trying to get big in ways that make it more likely you will get big or go bankrupt, whereas a more traditional company might take a more conservative approach.

I mean, the important distinction here that the market is maybe missing is that if an old company puts enough effort (or rather, has enough success) scaling their business using new technology, they probably should be put in the same risk/reward bucket, and if you do succeed, well, you probably should no longer be thought of as a 'tech' company by this definition. Like I think you could argue that Apple might not be a 'tech' company by that definition (you could argue that they were a tech company when they figured out how to sell pocket computers to normal people - of course, you could also argue that they try to do that all the time, it's just they are at the point in their product development lifecycle where they have a super successful old product and none of their new stuff is really that visible.)

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't understand what a brain computer interface gets you if it's not faster than hands and monitors. (I mean, I guess there's portability, but that doesn't seem super life changing to me; phones are pretty portable already, and I can do 8 bits a second on those, too.)

My keyboard and monitor are brain-computer interfaces. I'd argue that they are pretty useful.

I can imagine a way to consume information that is dramatically faster than the 500 or some odd words per minute I get reading.

But for input to the computer? I mean, I'm not saying that a keyboard can't be improved upon, but I think there are some hard limits to how quickly I can compose my thoughts; I think that it's fairly rare that the fingers are the limit. (Of course, making it so I think less about the fingers would be great)

What I'm saying is that there might be human processing speed issues that limit how much value we can get out of faster I/O.

On the other hand, maybe it's like reading was for me; before I could read at a certain speed and certain ease, I couldn't enjoy books, because I'd forget the beginning of the paragraph before I got to the end. Like I needed to load enough words at once to see the picture. It's totally possible that output would be the same way; if I could somehow output the equivalent of five hundred plus words per minute, maybe that would change my writing the same way passing that speed changed my reading?

What's interesting is that I think most people own just one general purpose computing device these days, their cellphone. Yeah, they maybe also have a TV that can play netflix or a game console, but my observation is that most people don't even have one PC in the old sense of "a general purpose computer with a physical keyboard that you use by sitting down" - and if you exclude laptops from the definition it's even more rare.