marvin

Breaking the sound barrier in your five-year-old’s bedroom seems like a dodgy business idea.

There’s one major feature request that triggered the change: being able to see patient journal notes made by other branches of the public health service.

Mandated to choose them due to cargo cult process.

They were the only vendor capable of submitting the «objective» tender that is madated by law, and the decisionmakers are too stupid and chickenshit to consider that this process is in itself guaranteed to produce a worse outcome than alternative approaches.

It's a term of art in finance; people who work with it daily don't think twice before using it. Computer science has a whole book full of these; comes with the subject.

Hope Musk ever takes a company public again. The anti-Musk aura means there’s decent odds of a far-below-real valuation in the public markets.

Well, you could buy it from him.

Even written, where I live. In principle even the author only wrote it for themselves, and no one ever knows. That’s pretty close to thoughtcrime.

This is in the context of fighting Russia, and current events demonstrate that the legitimacy of a target is moot.

But of course highways, infrastructure, is a relevant thing to destroy in war.

What if it was a lemur, though? Bet they don't have a code for that.

A pretty influential and very well-financed subculture of AI philosophers are currently performing a comprehensive lobbying campaign for AI regulation. They generally go by Rationalists or Effective Altruism, and have a philosophy stemming from MIRI, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nate Soares and others.

They've had considerable success getting traction for these views with politicians in Europe, and that's the reason you see so much of this in the media currently. I'm hoping more sane voices will soon get organized, because significant parts of this are reminiscent of a well-funded doomsday cult.

I think this article is an early attempt at creating a politically viable counterpoint.

Dividend companies don't have anything better to do with their profits than pay them back to investors. Sure, many successful companies will end up there at some point. But there's not much correlation with that and an investment that's good starting today.

You’re celebrating the possibility that EU regulation will remove Apple’s ability to enforce good user experience?

I don't know what happened behind the scenes. But I thought it was amusing when one of our mutual fund customers tried purchasing one share of each of the ~1000 funds we offered in our catalog. It obviously broke things; there were various UI things we hadn't tested for that kind of portfolio.

The main problem with the fediverse is that none of the people I want to read, post there. And they never will, because they are disparate sociopolitical demographics and the fediverse by design keeps them in separate instances that I at some level need to think about.

The majority use-case requires centralization, which is subject to the network effects that constitute 95% of Twitter's value. Great that it works for you and some others, but it cannot work for most.

Twitter feels more stable today, with less spam, than one year ago. There's of course parts that have been deliberately shut down, but that's not an argument about the core product.

And the policy certainly is stupid, as its second-order effects increase the risk that most of the passengers will die in the explosive fireball-like conflagration that could quickly follow a fire during evacuation.

It makes sense that one's privacy is a valuable asset one can sell.

If you don't increase your standard of living, it will. (Or the other caveats of course; assuming you're not already close to retirement, impending economic catastrophe or whatever).

Doubling salary post-tax will at the very least put you at a 50% savings rate, and that yields a time from zero to financial independence of 16.5 years. Assuming historically-similar stock market returns and a safe withdrawal rate of 4%. This relationship does not depend on absolute numbers beyond those stated above, only savings rate.

Most likely you'd not be starting from zero and having a positive savings rate already. Whether you'd be comfortable doing this is a different question. Many would never be, and hence never completely comfortable retiring.

Welcome to the beautiful world of empty, overconfident political promises that are smashed against the rocks of reality 30 years later.

This is why I plan to finance my own retirement and consider a minimum social security pension a happy bonus.

Make it seem to be profitable, obviously. France’s system is genius - supposedly, income can be shared between all household members regardless of age.

So the marginal tax rate becomes very low if you have three kids. Even incentivizes one parent to work less.

I'd call "may retire, or work on whatever you want for the rest of your life, after a few years of saving" life-changing.

Instant global distribution, to anyone with a computing device who enters the name of your app in a text box. Developers all over the world are paying billions per year in lost productivity for that killer feature. It's so easily worth it.

(I grew up on Delphi).

I have had well-educated French acquaintences telling me for a decade that France is ripe for a new system of government; the 6th in its history.

Many current problems stem from the fact that post-war mechanisms written into the governmental system are abused by the president and elected leaders. E.g. presidential overruling of parlamental votes.

It’s more envy than surprise; if they’re capable leaders then they must certainly lack in some other ability to learn and understand.

I wonder how many are willing tonpay that $5 per month. The community as a whole is worth disproportionally less if it becomes 90% smaller.

I wish we got more substantial critique than ad hominems, but it is out there, and some of it’s really scathing.

Essentially, it boils down to that the most pessimist AI doom arguments are built on a stack of mind experiment hypotheses that are each far from certain to actually occur, or to be unsolvable if they do. And also that a significant portion of those holding those views fall in fallacious mind-traps that resemble a classical doomsday cult too similarly to ignore.

All of these claims can and should be continuously investigated during future research, as both the hypothetical accidents and deliberate misuse definitely seem anything between possible and likely.

But when the suggested solutions — totalitarian research bans and in the extreme, literal nuclear war causing near-extinction of humans (Yudkowsky deleted a tweet to this effect) — are so counterproductive, strongly worded rebuttals are appropriate.

I do agree that those strongly-worded objections should be more prominent.

For reference, Charm Industrial offers $0.6/kg.

https://charmindustrial.com/plans?planName=consumer&budget=6...

Charm's pricing is actually approaching reasonable to offset a single person's net CO2 emissions if you're comfortably middle class; in the low 4 digits per month. Add a tax benefit and get the costs a bit lower, and it starts to look doable.

For most people who say this, it’s just a rationalization.

Acknowledging that kids are infeasible for economic reasons, like GP laid out, is just too painful and embarrassing. So the ‘environment’ fig leaf saves their dignity.

That's interesting and relevant to know if you'd be doing this a few times. And it doesn't invalidate your point at all, but the time savings of having a machine tell you really fast how to do something simple is valuable.

I recently had to do a 'git pull' on 120 repositories, and of course we already had an in-house tool to do that. Of course I could google a script to do it. But it saved me 5 minutes to just have ChatGPT write it for me, and I saved the overhead of a more thorough context-switch.

Even the guy sitting next to me. "Hey, check this out, ChatGPT wrote this script for me and saved me 5 minutes". "Oh, but we already have a tool for that". "Yeah, I figured. Where is it?" "Ummmmm, I don't know, let me ask someone. Frank maybe?" And 5 minutes spent chasing Frank.

You probably missed my implication: It's a misplaced accusation of hypocrisy.