Hear! hear! Why don’t we just start rolling back truck subsidies? If that’s not enough, maybe start incentivizing cars that aren’t tanks. The world is not more safe when everyone drives a tank. This is a tragedy of the commons
Oh! One of my favorite soap boxes! How about instead of making laws more restrictive for drivers, we change car regulations so that everyone isn’t driving a tank. Pedestrian deaths are on the rise because windows are smaller, cars are heavier, grills are larger, etc. Just start taxing tanks more heavily. Or, even easier, scale back subsidies for trucks
> If people are dumb enough to consentually waste time and money on casinos, they deserve to lose their time and money.
I find this to be a very naive perspective. It’s not how addiction works, and even people who want to stop sometimes cannot. And even if you buy into the belief that we shouldn’t help them, what about their kids? What about the communities around them that are worse for having addicts who are pouring money from their jobs into a black hole?
> I personally don't care.
I’m sorry to hear that, and I hope you can change your mind one day. We’re all going to die one day, and life is better if we care about each other
Yeah, perhaps alternatives like permanent address on a government issued ID would be better. But exceptional circumstances should be the exception; the more exceptions are made, the more loopholes creep in
If they’re registered to vote in the municipality, they do not pay the heavy taxes. Those taxes are only paid by people who do not reside in the town but own property there. So local teachers, service workers, etc. pay “normal” (low) taxes
I think high density housing is a band-aid because there are sometimes significant infrastructure challenges to packing more people into a town. I’m not saying not to do it; I think it’s a good solution for many places, but I do not believe it is simpler than taxation
I’m talking about much higher taxes than that. If you can afford a 10m slope-side deer valley home, make it a 1M+ annual tax.
The problem of people not being present cuts both ways, and I fall on the side of preferring people to be present. I want to live in a place where people are present in their communities - that doesn’t mean you have to go to every council meeting, but it does make you more invested in the quality of the neighborhood and town. Yes, you use more community services, but isn’t that the point? The local businesses have higher cash flow, you have to deal with that pothole on 7th that hasn’t been fixed yet, etc.
I’ve lived in and around mountain towns my whole life. There’s a relatively simple solution to this: taxation. If you don’t live there full time, you get to pay hefty taxes to the city/county. How do you verify this? Voter registration. If you’re not registered to vote at that address, you pay massive taxes. So, if you _really_ want to have a second home there, fine, but it’s going to be much less expensive for people who actually live there
Smoking increases risk of all cause mortality by 79% over non-smokers [0]. This means that your probability of dying by any cause in any time period is 79% higher if you smoke than of you didn’t smoke. If you’re not that worried about bpd or depression, perhaps you’ll consider all-cause-mortality.
I think this view is overly pessimistic. I’ve started to find statistics like the ones in this article to be more or less useless. No error bars, no distributions, no detail - maybe that trend is really just the top 2% (by pay) of the (tech) workforce being laid off. If bigtech lays off a bunch of people and those people end up working for less at startups, then perhaps this is better for everyone, especially in a high-interest-rate economy where those startups need to build real value and become durable businesses.
Private markets are still going to look for alpha in the tech sector (most relevant to readers of HN), and there is still lots of dry powder that can only be held for so long. The next 5 years could produce some really strong businesses that are currently only ideas - as long as we’re optimistic and willing to keep going
I think Europe is much better than the US for car safety. Having uniform bumper levels also help a lot. I’ve always wondered about the legality of driving a US pickup truck in Europe. Do you have any more resources about that sort of thing?
The article mentions safety, and I think safety is an interesting discussion because at its limit, it creates perverse incentives. Manufacturers focus on the safety of the driver and passengers of the car. Not on the safety of anyone else. Thus, the safest vehicle on the road is a tank. Your babies will never come to harm if you drive them to school in a Leopard 2 tank. But this is a worse outcome for everyone else. How do we make cars safer? We make the windows smaller and the body (armor plating) bigger at the expense of making it harder for the driver to see, we make lights brighter so the driver can see at the expense of blinding everyone around them, we raise the bumper of the vehicle so it rolls over other vehicles in an accident, we increase the length and width of a car so that it doesn’t roll at the expense of being able to make tight turns or fit in a parking space, on and on and on.
I think there is a point where we can say that “safety” has gone too far. Maybe we’re there now; maybe not, but I wish that this was a higher priority discussion because it has many downstream effects.
I think a lot of scientists are moving to Mastodon, but sometimes doubling their accounts. I am quite pleased with the feed that I’m getting on Mastodon now
Well, here I am replying to you on a social media platform (HN) to contribute to a discussion. So yes, social media does serve a purpose. It connects people and allows us to have discussions.
The problem you mention is a huge one with modern social media, and I think that it is exacerbated by the perverse incentives of engagement (ad) driven monetization. But there are healthier ways to use social media, and shifting data ownership away from a centralized oligopoly to a federated, decentralized model is a step in the right direction
This absolutely happens. Running a K (kritik) is a risk because if the judge decides that you’re full of shit, they can basically just ignore your case. Your opponent can make an argument to throw the kritik out, and then you’re dead in the water
In the case of fine tuning, you can end up with catastrophic forgetting. Architecture can influence how data scales, and adding data doesn’t always improve performance
> In January, the drug received what's known as accelerated approval from the FDA, based on its ability to remove the substance beta-amyloid from the brains of people in the early stages of Alzheimer's.
Whenever beta-amyloids come up, I recall that they seem to be quite divisive. Can someone explain to me what the debate is about? The FDA appears to believe that they are a cause of Alzheimer’s based on this drug’s approval
Correct. It’s a digital currency based on blockchains (or whatever the current buzzword might be). It allows central banks to tightly audit cashflow and exert greater control over how money is spent.
I’ll give you a very specific example. When turning on the flashlight, I have to hold the flashlight icon for a specific period of time. If I hold too long, I get the dimmer option. If I don’t hold long enough, it doesn’t turn on. The iphone expects what feels to me like a zen-like stoner’s calm press of the button. This is absolutely infuriating to me. Every time. Just turn the damn light on when I press the button.
Did you know that you can hold the spacebar to move your cursor around on iOS? Without my friend telling me about that feature, I also found text selection in iOS to be deeply frustrating as compared to Android
Yeah, ok. But I would really love it if content creators stopped putting kindergarten emotion faces on thumbnails. Replacing a doorknob will never require a level of emotion indicated by hands on cheeks eyes wide “Oh” face… So just please, please stop. I’ll even cave on shitty titles like “most people don’t know this” or “you’re doing X wrong” if it means that I can stop looking at people making stupid faces in every thumbnail
Because running a business on cryptocurrency adds a lot of other operational headaches. Like volatility and currency conversion. If I’m running a small business, I want to focus on that and not an additional forex business
This assumes that your dreams are internally consistent and that you have defined them well enough to know when you’ve achieved them. I’ve met very few people whose dreams that satisfied both of those criteria. If you are one of them, my anecdata marks you as the exception
If this got more development energy put on matrix bridges, this seems like a net win. IRC still works, but is used through a matrix bridge… I would love to have a unified chat layer
> In addition, they created an architecture that simulates minds with memories and experiences
This sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I’m excited to see what they actually did. Semantic search in past text? Some lossy encoding if past world state? Something else entirely?
Also, I’m interested to hear what they’re doing with action spaces. It sounds like RL, so what’s the reward function?
Investors make for spectacular customers for a few years. You can sell them dreams! Many companies struggle when they need to pivot away from this model
The answer can be both. There are times when deadlines are fixed, the path is known, and everyone just needs to march in the same direction. There are other times when a company faces an existential threat from a new technology. This is when having your best minds “messing around” can be hugely beneficial. For example, pivoting your photograph company to a makeup company is not intuitive to me, and is an idea that could have come from someone screwing around in a lab. It is also a tome of huge pressure, and managing that dichotomy is what good managers do
China is already experimenting with social credit. This does create a unified and measurable goal against which people can be optimized. And yes, that is terrifying.