nautilius

It's rarely the engineer deciding this.

Yeah, but there wasn't an attack.

I think I remember better now. It was Friedman discussing the notion of some iPad app that could be used to learn and educate, adapting to the user, etc. Stephenson replied that he had indeed written a whole book about it (Diamond Age).

Not so impressed by the research: I forgot the exact wording, but it took me a lot of effort to keep listening when he asked Neal Stephenson something to the effect of if he had ever heard of the metaverse.

You want to be a PhD employee so that you don't have to pay college out of your own pocket.

Sure, most would prefer to be rich, or have their parents be rich, or having gotten a full ride or some other stipend. But that's not the norm for most PhD students. For most, the alternative to not being a PhD student employee is to leave college and become an employee employee.

If the argument goes “The US is the world greatest at …” there is not much of a point to compare it to the worst countries in the world* and then pat yourself on the back that the US, say, has better infrastructure than Ukraine during a war.

*whatever that means for the US Greatest du jour

I would think many people on HN have US taxation without US representation. A bit ironic, really.

In my experience, the free university was much harder than the expensive university.

Yeah, have you heard of that Patent clerk in Switzerland who wrote about what changes when we ride on a train close to the speed of light - even though we’re still not capable of building a train that fast, more than a century after. What a waste.

It will not be, because the content of 'artificial' kerosene can be controlled exactly. E.g., there is no way even trace amounts of sulfur could enter manufactured kerosene.

It’s a bit more complicated than that:

glider wing area ~10m2, F16 ~30m2, F22 ~80m2

> "[Hypersonic] Maneuverable reentry vehicles have existed for quite a while"

I keep reading this comment on HN. It's like saying "What's the deal with Chuck Yaeger breaking the sound barrier, we've had supersonic bullets that do that for a long time". There is zero overlap between the two.

Maneuverable reentry vehicles can wobble around a bit while falling, whereas the point of hypersonic weapons is maneuverability for a significant part of the trajectory.

Your only comment about heat load is that it's the most important factor and then I should look at some picture. There's zero reasoning in that picture.

After struggling with the sluggishness on a Mac for a long time, I am super excited that 1.2 finally works super smooth for me on an M1!

He makes money off of it. There’s nothing wrong with that, but that doesn’t make him a charity, imo.

You could make the same case for Walmart: look at all the people (employees) they hand money out to! With many of them likely having much tougher lives than I do and thus being absolutely deserving of the money. But Walmart does it for the sole reason that it improves their bottom line —- just like Mr Beast.

Do you think Mr Beast would insist on spending millions in a video if he could create the same income from just “Giving $1.5 to strangers!” videos?

Interesting then that a religious society like the U.S. (>80% consider themselves religious) does not actually support helping others. This is particularly striking for law enforcement, who have no obligation to help, and then are free to choose not to. Last month, cops watched a man drown, and that's apparently perfectly fine https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/06/arizona-man-...

Humanist secular societies (e.g. France, Germany, ~30% religious people) instead have a culture and legislature that makes helping others an important duty; law enforcement and also civil citizens have a moral and legal duty to help, and it would be morally and legally unacceptable to watch someone drown.

Great overview of that art style, its origins/goals/shortcomings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOom5YYv1qQ

I'm not sure you understand what a necessary condition is.

Easily disproven by all the countries that were not constantly at war despite low connectedness.

In the (absurd) limit: There was no war between Australia and the Roman Empire in 100BC.

More practical: existence of a Cold War in the 20th century.

It's a comically naive view on the dropped atomic bombs that this was in any way based on 'costs and consequences of the alternative'. The opposite is true, as is well documented in countless books and statements by the people involved at the time:

The key reasons they were dropped was (1) the cost of developing the atomic bomb at 2 billion dollars, and (2) to demonstrate this capability to the future enemies, the Russians.

But you're not alone in your assessment. Notably, recently dozens of cops watched kids being massacred for an hour, because the alternative would have been that officers could have been hurt, which is clearly unacceptable https://twitter.com/VAKruta/status/1529977770931113987?ref_s...

Let's not kid ourselves: had any party on the losing side of the war pulled that off, the people involved would have been hung as war criminals.

I mean, you’re the one calling incinerating kindergarteners ‘totally justified’.

Saving more American servicemen lives at the expense of Japanese children and other non-combatants.

An article about how word processors are superior to LaTeX by someone who has never written anything with LaTeX, not even finished a single paper.

It's like writing an article about how walking is much faster than cycling, because 'I tried cycling once and fell over, so clearly all those fetishists are wrong, the suckers'.

Of course 'evolution' is not an actor, it's just the overall pattern we give a name to. And the pattern we observe is that low fitness entities are eliminated. That plus variation yields adaptation.

> That suggests that a tiger is just a tiger,

Not at all. Everything can come from variation (mutation, cross over) + elimination of the worst. It's just that 'worst' is not a global minimum. Are we as humans superior to animals in strength, agility, speed, etc? Not at all. But some distant ancestor had some bigger brain, and that gave it all the edge it needed compared to weak and dumber siblings that were eaten, while our ancestor hid on a tree.

When some animal mutated to be able to eat meat in addition to plants, it had some advantage and was less likely to be eliminated when food got scarce. That's all you need to eventually arrive at something tiger-like.

That said, some animals seem to have reached a local maximum: sharks haven't changed in millions of years, cockroaches seem pretty successful, too.

But there's nothing 'creative' about it.

There's a huge world you are not aware of then: I used to stop at a small grocer downtown every day on my bike commute home. That's absolutely a lot less time and much less hassle than getting the car out, driving to some huge shop with lots of parking, finding parking, filling gas, and then making several trips from car to home. And, obviously, if you want fresh bread/produce/etc. that requires more frequent shopping.

This is assuming that your car trip starts and stops conveniently with available parking right at the point of departure and parking at the point of arrival, and that there is non-delayed traffic flow precisely at the right time. In practice that's not the case and those time add up quickly. This is also assuming that with a car you never have surplus times, such as filling up gas, taking breaks from driving yourself, and let's not forget about maintenance, while we're at it.

Don't get me wrong, I often prefer the car, but that post is comically one-sided.

Shifting goalposts, are we, after your 'clearly' comment did not even contain a grain of truth about what OP posted?

And yes, you are missing something. Go ahead and watch Chapelle. The issue isn't that he makes a joke about trans people. Sure, I'd assume people in general may not like having jokes made at their expense, but that's not the issue. The issue is that Chapelle dedicates a whole special to argue that their cause isn't worthy to be supported. As much as I like Chapelle and his amazing ability to do hour-long stand-ups where he doesn't even tell jokes and yet you're mesmerized, I'll have to side with the 'punching down' argument. This campaign of his will not age well.

I understand his frustration, and, in his words, jealousy, to see how far LGBTQ+ rights have come compared to the much older issue of Black rights, but that's a really poor justification to rant against the former.

Just imagine that same setup to watch someone rant for an hour against women suffrage, or gay or Black rights, etc. Sure, some will like this.

Is that before or after they are drafted to serve in Jewish Space Lasers?

I see no contradiction between our posts.