philwelch

What a load of pointless handwringing.

So someone who can barely walk is supposed to safely jump from a space capsule to a boat in the middle of the ocean?

“Stepping” from one vessel to another in the middle of the ocean is not like getting on your buddy’s sailboat at the marina even if you have your sea legs. Astronauts don’t even have their earth legs when they splash down; when they return from ISS they can’t even walk right away, though Artemis was a shorter duration mission than that.

This is the same mission where the commander radioed to Houston, “I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working”.

If we got to a point where going to the Moon was significantly safer than that, we’d better start trying things even more ambitious and risky or we’ll stagnate as a species. The fatality rates for circumnavigating the globe or settling in North America or attempting to invent a working flying machine were much, much higher than that.

It's because of the way companies align their own behavior. "Listening to feedback" is just a good intention but increasing engagement with copilot is a measurable goal. With apologies to George Orwell, imagine an OKR stamping on a human face--forever.

Working as intended

Most people who ask for advice actually want affirmation. If you ever give them advice instead of affirmation, you end up kicking off a rousing game of “Why Don’t You/Yes But”. (https://ericberne.com/games-people-play/why-dont-you-yes-but...)

A few years ago I got annoyed at Google and switched to Apple Maps. Earlier this year I got annoyed with Apple Maps and tried Google Maps again before switching back. Point of interest data was a minor factor in all of this. It might be enough to lock me into using Google to find local businesses I didn’t know about before, but that doesn’t force me to use Google Maps for turn by turn navigation.

This is a lot simpler if you own a personal domain name. You’re still going to have pain setting that up the first time, but afterwards any future migrations will be much easier.

I can definitely relate to that, and I'm actually quite fond of git myself. I just never expected that people would stop trying to make a better version control system. That's not entirely fair, a lot of work has been invested in Pijul and Fossil, but I would have expected much more interest in alternatives. I remember all of the reasons Git was so new and exciting at the time, but now it feels like we're all locked into it, not out of any deliberate attempt at vendor lockin but out of complacency, and because fewer and fewer of us still remember a time that it felt possible to invent a better version control system.

Regardless of the merits of CRDT's, I'm just glad someone is finally trying to create a new version control system. Everyone loves to complain about Git but nobody's actually tried to move beyond it in two decades.

Yes, this sort of thing has been a plague against the English language for a few years now, responsible for such ugly constructions as "to unalive".

(I understand and respect the linguists who would maintain a descriptivist view of this sort of thing, but I'm not a linguist and I'm not required to suspend my aesthetic opinions whenever an ugly fashion rears its head.)

Hey at least they finished Perl 6!

"PDF" is a zoomer euphemism for "pedophile".

To be fair, this raises an interesting question of epistemology. Can any man know for sure that his wife has never had sex with Afroman? It's almost always possible, however unlikely. One can and probably should trust that his wife hasn't had sex with Afroman, but it's rarely possible to be absolutely certain.

Ballistic missiles are pretty expensive. You'd have to bid a lot of money for it to be worthwhile to shoot them at a country just to make money on Polymarket.

If there was a prediction market for whether I'll be hit by a car tomorrow, and it was lucrative enough that it would actually be worth anyone's time to deliberately hit me with a car, I'd stay home and bid on "no". Pretty sure I'd make more than enough to cover the cost of ordering pizza.

There are already perverse incentives to commit arson, like insurance. And it's entirely possible that prediction markets can make insurance even more cost-effective.

> Are you gonna tell me residents in Tel Aviv will be able to hedge their chances of surviving tomorrow?

Yes, of course! If you had some advance warning your home town was likely to be struck with missiles soon, are you seriously saying you can't think of a single thing you could do to prepare? I would, at a minimum, make sure I was stocked up on first aid supplies, water, and food that I could eat without needing power or gas to cook it.

They might have been in the last decade, but now it’s just yet another franchise audiences have stopped caring about.

They have no one to blame but themselves, judging by the quality of Hollywood movies in recent years.

You make a good argument for the opposite of your conclusion. If you’re planning a system that’s supposed to last for millennia, that system shouldn’t depend on the fiat of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service.

> There is some talk of eliminating the leap second, which would over time have the Earth and sun diverge with regards to noon and such

“Over time” really glosses over how much time it would take. In 500 years there might be half as much divergence between solar noon and 12:00pm as we intentionally inflict on ourselves with DST, or that France and Spain inflicted on themselves in the 1940’s so they could share a time zone with Germany. By the time anyone will even notice we will probably change time systems for other reasons anyway. It’s not even remotely comparable to the Julian/Gregorian issue, which dealt with leap days. Each day has 86400 seconds.

The honest usage of “it turns out” is usually to gloss over an unnecessarily tedious argument that the author doesn’t want to waste your time with. And I think this is a fair characterization of even the use that the author criticizes here:

> When I moved to New York, I was very excited at first. It's an exciting place. So it took me quite a while to realize I just wasn't like the people there. I kept searching for the Cambridge of New York. It turned out it was way, way uptown: an hour uptown by air.

In principle, it’s entirely possible that pg kept a detailed diary of his attempt to find a community of intellectual peers in NY that compared to the one he found in Cambridge, and if you read the entire diary you would be satisfied that he carried out an exhaustive search. But even if that were the case (I wouldn’t expect it to be; who keeps detailed diaries documenting every opinion they ever form), that would dominate the length of an essay that was supposed to be about how cities work as focus hubs for specific types of ambition.

That’s not to say pg can’t be wrong about this point; it’s still a statement of opinion. What “it turns out” really signifies is that the author made a serious effort to investigate the question prior to forming the conclusion. They might be lying about that, but they can also lie about facts.

I guess I just consider it an insult to the reader’s intelligence to say that ‘it turns out’ is a particularly deceptive way to sneak in an unsubstantiated conclusion, because it’s not very sneaky. If I said “it turns out the moon really is made of cheese”, nobody would be fooled. If Buzz Aldrin said it, a few people might be fooled, but only because they already know he’s actually been there.

On the other hand, we routinely accept “it turns out” reasoning all the time, in the sense that we generally trust other people to come to conclusions that we don’t feel the need to audit. If I get labs done at the doctor’s office and it turns out I have high cholesterol, I don’t have a particular need to audit the lab’s methodology. You can’t rigorously audit all of the information in the world and if a writer you reasonably trust writes “it turns out” that X, you are reasonably justified in updating your certainty that X is true.

It’s possible to build mechanisms for this. Not perfect or foolproof ones. Maybe your phone stores a digital ID for its owner and sets a cryptographically signed “IsAdult” header. If you pull the signing key from the phone you can spoof that, but you can bring a fake ID to the bar too.

The problem is that the people who want age verification don’t really care about the technical details of how it’s implemented and the people who oppose age verification just want unfettered online pornography out of principle, so no one is actually thinking about how to implement age verification in a way that protects privacy.

And horses actually do better on dirt than on pavement.

That doesn’t change the fact that you’re selectively counting only one side of a closed loop process. Methane may be a more efficient greenhouse gas than CO2 but if that effect dominated, we would expect to see the global warming trend start with the evolution of ruminants, not the Industrial Revolution (a time when the North American ruminant population actually declined a significant amount!)

Surely you can’t be suggesting that a committee of environmental activists might be biased in favor of Greenpeace?

https://www.trialmonitors.org/meet-the-committee

Where are these emissions coming from? For instance, if this is counting the emissions involved in logistics, none of that inherently or necessarily requires greenhouse emissions—you can electrify trains, tanker trucks, and refrigerators.

If this is counting the methane emissions of the cow itself, that’s not a fair or complete accounting. The cow produces methane in her digestive system after eating grass, and the grass grows by, among other things, extracting CO2 from the air. Then the cow burps methane, the methane combines with atmospheric oxygen and breaks down to CO2 and water, and you have a closed loop; the cow cannot belch more carbon than she eats, and that carbon came from the air in the first place.

> occasionally in dense city centers

Another example I worked out once

A Ford F-150 weighs about 2 tons and has two axles, for an axle weight of 1 ton. 1^4=1.

A garbage truck weighs maybe 30 tons and has three axles, for an axle weight of 10 tons. 10^4=10,000.

So if you drive an F-150, you’re doing as much road damage driving down the street 10,000 times as the garbage truck does once. Rural areas that don’t have garbage trucks and just expect everyone to haul their garbage to the dump in the back of their pickups are onto something.

The samurai didn’t survive the Satsuma Rebellion but they were admired and respected even by many of the people who fought against them in the following decades. You don’t even have to be Japanese to think samurai are cool, they just are, even if, in practice, you wouldn’t want to actually live in a society with them.