profsummergig

Ah. Should have thought of that. Going to do that now. Thanks.

Thank you.

Thank you for digging into the details and displaying their clear ridiculousness. As someone who finished a 750ml bottle (17 drinks) over 4 days this week, the headline had me freaking out. Whew.

> Anthropic apparently is starting to notice the possible danger to others of their work. I'm not sure what they are referring to.

Are they being vague about the danger? If possible, please link to a communique from them. I've missed it somehow. Thanks.

I skimmed the Anthropic report and didn't catch the negative effects. Did they mention any? Good on them if they did.

Zeihan is a case of believing the message because the messenger is so articulate and charming. He's a tremendously interesting narrative builder (in the vein of Taleb's narrative fallacy). I've been tracking his predictions for a few years now. I want him to be right. Unfortunately, he's seldom right.

He also seems to be veering into fabulism. He's recently said in multiple interviews that there's a clothing factory in North Carolina that is so automated that only 2 "guys" are needed to run it. Raw cotton comes in at one end, and finished clothing comes out at the other (hence Chinese labor is not needed to stitch clothes, hence China is going to collapse any day now).

Why do I believe this is fabulism? He never names this company. And the story has evolved. In earlier interviews he used to say that cloth comes out at the other end. But in a couple of recent interviews he's said finished clothing comes out at the other end.

Requesting someone to please explain the "coquina" metaphor.

> Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes.

I blame Peter Zeihan for this kind of thinking. His views are immensely popular in the very powerful and influential circles. And he constantly derides China's capabilities. Since 2014 he's been saying it's going to collapse any day now. He still says it.

The gut biome thing.

There have been murmurs on the conspiracy internet about how artificial sweeteners may have been responsible for making gut biomes less effective.

This seems related. The gut biome refers to bacteria in the gut.

I love using it. It helped me resuscitate a bricked PC two days ago. Yesterday it cleaned up and explained some robocopy code for me. And today it taught me how to download several less powerful versions of itself to my PC to run locally.

This is such a traditional British way to go about scientific inquiry. Unlikely such experiments would be allowed today. Seems we've lost something.

Does it have to be a suspension bridge for some reason?

It's only 3 km?

Shocked that they don't have a bridge already.

I've often wondered about how even with Legos it's very difficult to create perfectly aligned little passages running diagonally in such structures.

Would be cool to learn how they did it with multi-ton blocks of stone.

Very cool. The AI-generated summary, do you have to pay for an API for that or are these kinds of services available free these days?

It was one of the two: VDem, or Freedom House.

I don't remember with 100% surety which one it was. I think it was VDem.

The reason I called it a "deep dive" is because it took a huge amount of digging in their publications to find the specifics of the methodology.

I once took a deep dive into the methodology of one of the custodians of "democracy rankings". It is one of the 2 most popular custodians.

Their methodology for each country was different.

For India their methodology was to survey 36 important people in the country. They did not disclose who these people were.

The survey asked them to share whether democracy was "backsliding" or whether it was becoming stronger, than the past.

And that too. Bollywood movies are said to include r*pe scenes to increase sales. It's really sad.

There was a recent scandal involving someone spitting paan/chewing tobacco on the floor inside one of the state assemblies.

A video I watched of a brand spanking new metro station in Mumbai. Marble floors and all. And a commenter pointed out a timestamp where you can see paan/chewing tobacco spit in a corner of the floor.

Here's what baffles me. It is well established that Indians chew paan/chewing tobacco. It is well established that they then spit these out. Why don't they have spitoons installed inside the state assembly or metro stations? Treat it as a cultural opportunity: create beautiful spitoons with culturally relevant designs on them. The type kings used to have in their courts. And have them sponsored by businesses (i.e. let them post digital banner ads on them). Enlightened capitalism!

The recent Delhi election,

I was watching videos of some of the slums.

There were literal hills of rotting organic garbage inside the slums. With children living next to them.

I had visions of Paul Ehrlich freaking out at the sight of people defecating and bathing on the roadside in Delhi.

I saw photos of some of the "mohalla clinics" (free basic healthcare clinics) that the previous Delhi government had (admittedly admirably) set up. Some of them looked so dirty and structurally unsound that they wouldn't be allowed to function as holding pens for farm animals in the US.

In the US, we have companies like Waste Management handle our waste. Surprises me that India doesn't have a dozen Waste Managements by now. Billion dollar unicorns/startups/whatever, innovating in turning "waste to wealth" (as Nitin Gadkari calls it). Put capitalism to use where there's a failure of non-capitalism to solve the problem. But there might be deep cultural issues. I suspect the caste system plays a part. The forward castes believe that trash management is beneath them.

India really needs to work on consciousness-raising regarding sanitation/cleanliness.

Modi made a start in 2014. I don't know why the momentum stopped. Some of the videos coming out of there (e.g. the recent video of the railway employee throwing a huge amount of used disposable plastic food trays off a moving train) are shocking.

> diet is also relatively lower in bread

I've wondered about about carb substitution. The rice, and the wheat noodles, why are they healthier? (I can understand rice somewhat: it's less processed, by certain definitions.)

Why does capitalism not make people fat in Japan, France, Italy and Spain?

I started drinking too much alcohol during the lockdown era.

I experimented with non-alcoholic mocktails. The one that works for me is diet cola + milk in equal proportions. Somehow provides the combination of richness/creaminess, sweetness, bitterness that replaces the feeling of drinking Irish cream.

Diet cola contains aspartame. Anyone know if there's a safer non-sugar version of or alternative to diet cola that I could use instead?

Thanks. Keyword jamming.

Elaborate please? I googled the term but didn't get anything certain.

Serious question: what's the definition of "skilled software engineer"?

For a while I kept getting soft-porn-adjacent videos. Of girls in very skimpy clothing doing "challenges". Non-stop. Effective strategy to get the dad and granddad eyeballs.

AFAICT, internet advertising doesn't work (I never click on any ads). Anyone have theories on how Meta is making so much money (the reason for its insane valuation)?

I was thinking: "an entire article about a guy who used to tan at a hotel pool... when we start focusing on such trifles, it's usually a foreshadowing of some major upheaval coming."

Then I saw the year of publication: 1993.

Windows here.

I use VSCode for markdown.

Obsidian's been coming up on the radar often.

This post finally made me try it out.

I like it a lot.

But there's one reason I won't be using it as my main driver for markdown files: I can't open files that are not in a vault. I have markdown files everywhere on my drive. And I don't want to make the entire drive a vault (for various reasons).

Obsidian configurable as...

1) my default file handler for markdown files

2) capable of opening and saving markdown files in any location on my PC

...would be sweet. (From my research, it can't do these currently.)