rickydroll

Yes, but are they ballistic material? Can they protect the wearer against small arms fire just like they do in the John Wick movie?

They are called “entitlements” because we have a reasonable expectation of getting what we were promised when we agreed to pay taxes as our part of the social contract.

If you say, “We should have invested more,” I point you to the 40% of current retirees that were not in a position to invest because their jobs didn't pay them enough above the cost of existing. And then there are any number of events, such as age discrimination, common medical issues, divorce, and bankruptcy, that destroy retirement plans.

From what I can tell, it's not possible for the vast majority of the population to be able to save for a 20 plus year retirement.

One of the things that keep people from saving are the activities driven by their investing in the stock market. To increase returns, "Activist investors" and private equity drive companies to shed jobs. You shed a job, you destroy a person's ability to save for retirement, which makes them more dependent on the social contract of Social Security and Medicare.

Cutting benefits will only cause suffering. The cost will fall on society in other ways in terms of elderly homeless people filling the ERs, begging in the streets, or committing suicide. Is it time for a "Modest Proposal II"?

Interesting. I didn't know the original purpose was censorship. As far as I can tell, today the only purpose it has is to give you standing to sue and extract rent.

The AI systems have moved on from goats and are now acting like bored border collies that no longer have a flock to manage.

The solution I'm advocating (until somebody can prove that I have my head up my ass on the topic) is increasing moments where an asset becomes cash before it is transferred.

For example, borrow, spend, die is effectively a financial instrument to cash conversion.

Inheritance: Get rid of the inheritance taxes and treat it as cash for tax purposes and have the estate pay the tax.

Make stock buybacks illegal.

I can see there would be an advantage to storing the income averaging part of the tax code so that if someone like us mortals gets a big windfall (inheritance, IPO grant), you can spread the income out over time.

I could use a much smaller house than I have now and a much larger garage for tools, workshops, art studio, etc. But for me, the value of a larger property is that I get to go out of the house and spend time in the garden. Sometimes something as simple as pulling up weeds is a considerable boost to my mental health. Kneeling on a garden bench in the sun in the weather and pulling weeds is not something that's “enjoyable," but it is rejuvenating.

My 92-year-old mom has been the same way. Until one of her daughters moved in, she lived by herself in her house and garden. Just being able to go outside and experience the green space she planned and planted has kept her alive and healthy. If she were in some senior living place, she'd be dead by now. She would have withdrawn into her room and waited for her time.

Like others, I'm getting the one-frame every 2 or 3 seconds behavior. But I'm finding something I didn't expect. I'm listening to the sound and not watching the koi, and that is incredibly soothing/relaxing for my ADHD mind. If you generate the audio locally, maybe that should be a single page all by itself and not worry about the fish, or perhaps I should say, And thanks for the fish.

Thanks for the reference. I'm trying it out now, and I'll see how well it works over the following days, but assuming it works right for me, I'll probably ditch my Grammarly subscription and go to this package (assuming it's a saner company).

Just went through my first corrections, and I think I like it. It isn't as aggressive as Grammarly, and I have mixed feelings about that, as I thought Grammarly did improve my writing, clarity, and presentation. It also feels easier to learn by example and reinforce better grammar from the start.

I tried out the AI rewrite, and man, it hits the uncanny valley hard.

---- Below is the above corrected by grammarly

Thanks for the reference. I'm trying it out now and will see how well it works over the next few days, but if it works for me, I'll probably ditch my Grammarly subscription and switch to this package (assuming it's a saner company).

Just went through my first corrections, and I think I like it. It isn't as aggressive as Grammarly, and I have mixed feelings about that, since I thought Grammarly improved my writing, clarity, and presentation. It also feels easier to learn by example and reinforce better grammar from the start.

I tried out the AI rewrite, and man, it hits the uncanny valley hard.

[Edit: Corrected a sentence that was missed by both Grammarly and LanguageTool. See if you can figure out which one it was]

A properly funded education works only if you pair it with writing practice and continued correction of grammatical errors that creep in as you develop writing habits. A properly funded education doesn't fix grammatical errors caused by language-processing deficits. Tools like Grammarly give the language-deficient writer more confidence and willingness to write. To me, they are as essential as a spell checker.

A properly funded public education doesn't cover speech-recognition-driven errors. I've talked about this before, but when you write using speech recognition, you need to shift from speaking spoken speech to speaking written speech.

Spoken speech is very sloppy with grammar. We forgive a tremendous amount of detail, forgive a lot of errors because we're focused on what they are saying, not how they are saying it. Grammarly also catches speech-recognition errors.

The usual retort is that one should spend more energy on proofreading your writing; many speech recognition users come to understand that your brain sees what you said, not what's on the page. The fix is to stick your writing in a drawer long enough to forget what you wrote, which isn't a great plan when you need an email in 5 minutes.

So, if not Grammarly, what?

I wonder how much of that per-person cost difference is due to government-run versus private-industry-run.

Why would you measure transactions by the distance between Earth and the Sun?

Look at the National Guard model. I'm also thinking that if we made it a regular thing, like the draft, employers could be required to hold the slot open for the person after they've done their tour of duty.

However, as I think about this, it would work best at the municipal level, moderately well at the state level, but not at all at the federal level. For the federal level, I think we would need to move to publicly funded campaigns and strong barriers against lobbyists and industry-written legislation.

I suspect my opinion on this won't be very popular, but it's like driving a car. If you're going to learn how to drive four wheels, you should start by taking the motorcycle safety course and learn on two wheels first. We can discuss why later.

Taking that concept to programming, I wouldn't start with a desktop or a web app. I would start with a little embedded system like an ESP32 or one of the small Raspberry Pi controllers (2350). I've come to this opinion because of the people I've mentored as they improved their code-writing skills. The ones who did best were the ones who started with embedded systems.

I believe you have to get down and dirty with the machine to understand the code and what it's doing. If you're making a motor controller work, you can use an LLM to generate code using a library or some cut-and-paste MicroPython code. But when it doesn't work, you have to break out the cheapy mini scope you got from Amazon and look at the waveforms.

Seriously, get your hands dirty at the controller level; understand queues as driven by hardware, not hidden in a library. Or, even simpler: you need to understand why the blinking lights are blinking, but not the way you thought they would.

If I were writing a course on programming, I would give students deliberately and increasingly wrong cut-and-paste code and leave the solution as an exercise to the reader.

today, the r9700 is 1800$ at micro center :-( so payoff is around 2 months?

The gimmicky episodes were highly entertaining to my decidedly non-Trekkie wife. She loved the Star Trek Muppet episode ("Star Trek in Spaaaaaace") and the soap-opera episode.

As for taking the show seriously, I don't take any of it seriously. It's a telenovela, or maybe we should say Stellanovela. Most episodes build a fairly cohesive story, then break loose, and those old scientists have fun with the Star Trek universe. It's not like they're acting in a Chekhov play.

The fundamental question is: why should I use Jabber? What's the use case that makes it better than WhatsApp, Signal, et cetera?

My most-used messaging app is SMS because if you have a cell phone, you have SMS. Example this morning is I made a connection with a handyman recommended by a friend. Text message, and it just worked.

So what's the compelling reason to move to Jabber? Why should my 92-year-old mother use it?

I also like the idea of pacing the frontier and slowing down development so we all have a chance to stop and catch our breath. However, I don't think regulating AI is the way to do it. I would tackle the problem by constraining the resources used to run AI models; the "simplest" way to do that is increasing the costs of running a data center. The two easiest places to raise data center costs are electricity and water tariffs.

I think those two tariffs are the best place to raise costs because they can be increased incrementally, state by state or country by country. The main problem with the regulatory approach is that it's a "big bang" post-board approach. Nothing happens until the regulation is defined and deployed, and corporations are experts at delaying implementation.

Yes, increasing tariffs means touching many individual regulatory domains at the state and municipal levels, but like deploying solar energy or wind power, you can do it incrementally.

Whenever someone talks about regulation, I always have the same question: How do you enforce it? How do you keep companies from using the replaced talent as a seat warmer? Hire 1 or 2 accountants, give them a chair and a cubicle, and let AI do the rest of the work.

Legislating against using AI to replace employees could create an unevenly distributed basic income. The idea of limiting AI to socially beneficial efforts is appealing, but I keep coming back to Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. Cool stuff was developed when you gave smart people a playground. Maybe the question should be: How do we give AI a playground and see what it comes up with? Although that could set us up with a situation like in the story Dragon's Egg.

It's not at all scary. I know some of my ideas are poorly remembered copies of other people's work. Whenever I'm trying to build something, I spend time going through technical journals on the topic to see who invented it first and what they discovered that I haven't figured out yet. It's amazing how hours in the library save you days of beating your head against the wall.

I suggest looking at the past history of IP disputes. Humans have been "slurping up and regurgitating ideas" for a very long time. There are lots of examples of parallel creation, rediscovering old ideas independently, telling an idea to the wrong person, and having them claim credit for it.

- Newton/Leibniz clash over who invented calculus. - Niccolò Tartaglia vs. Gerolamo Cardano clash over the formula used to solve cubic equations. This was also an independent rediscovery, as Scipione del Ferro discovered and published the formula earlier. - There are multiple literary works in print, music, and film that have competing claims. - Meccano versus Erector Set: developed about 20 years apart in England and the United States. Unclear if it's independent invention or copied. US developer Alfred Carlton Gilbert claims he was inspired by steel girder construction of infrastructure.

also https://community.thriveglobal.com/10-famous-inventions-that...

I try to keep only 3 or 4 of the same cable, and if one gets damaged, I throw it away after the fourth or fifth time I look at it and wonder if I can fix it.

The basic argument is extremely simple:

- goats can, depending on context, pursue a task with complete disregard for humans/values

- In the future, goats will have enormously more means and smarts

- A goat could then assess that humans are an impediment to its tasks, escape containment and proceed.

You really need to raise goats, you'll be surprised.

------ As far as I can tell, AIs are like smart farm animals. I use goats in this context, but (some) dogs, cattle, pigs, and horses have similar mischief-making capabilities. I would not trust any of them with the nuclear button.

I know there is some pushback on the idea of AIs having any sort of sapience or sentience, but under the aphorism "fake it till you make it," they are doing a pretty good job of faking Dog/goat-level intelligence and disregard for human guardrails.

good points, using the grid as an export sink, incurs externalities. the choice is to pay them by accepting the net-metering rate or avoid them by running a zero export system.

That's why I said kinda. Strictly speaking, you are right. They don't own your system. However, to me if somebody controls what you do with your electricity I.e export or curtailed, you don't own the the work product of your system.

Virtual power plant model you've described doesn't exist here in New England. National grid has some sort of thing where you can make a grand or two a year if they can use your battery during times of high demand. If I could do it standard off-the-shelf components, I could put together such a system for $6,000 installed but the payoff is in the decade range since we have flat rate power through municipal buying co-op.

An alternative would be a local tax on generator hours.

They kinda do via net metering tariffs and curtailment. I'm a big fan of 0 export systems as a way to keep more for yourself.

Now if one could get spot prices and sell your power then...the system gets more interesting.

Yes, a carbon tax would go a long way, but I think a broader view is to look for ways to use taxes to shift externalities back onto the organizations that created the problem. For example, data centers (a popular demon). The two main externalities are water consumption and power consumption. The tariffs for providing those services to a data center should be high enough to compensate the rest of the community for the impact the data center has on the community.

For example, tariffs could be used to subsidize non-data-center power users. Higher tariffs could also be used to fund community solar and community BESS, helping provide greater local grid resilience. For example, the tariffs should be high enough to subsidize everybody else so they don't have to pay more for their electric service, roughly speaking.

I would also advocate closing the on-prem generator loophole by classifying on-prem power generation services as belonging to or leased from local utilities, and setting the tariff for locally generated power to match the tariff they pay for drawing from the grid.

That's a really good point. I've seen some work on retaining moisture in the desert, and if memory serves, the successful ones create small check dams to retard water flow down a watercourse, giving it time to soak into the ground and replenish groundwater.

It would be interesting to see whether one could apply that to European waterways as part of marshland regeneration.

And they've been through significant financial and organizational chaos for probably 10 to 15 of those years. I really do hope they succeed and get a product out there. It would be a big win for a large group of people.

Interestingly, back in my ill-spent youth, a few of my fellow astronomers and I were out in a very, very dark-sky location in the late 70s/early 80s, and we were able to consistently count and draw between 9 and 11 stars. Although we would tease those who could see 11 stars as using averted imagination. :-) Today, if I can see six stars, it's an okay night in an okay sky.

fwiw, if you can get out to dark skies where you can see fifth- or sixth-magnitude stars with the naked eye, I highly recommend getting out there when it's a low-moisture atmosphere and the Milky Way through Cassiopeia and Perseus is vertical, as it's a rather dramatic sight of this stream of stars heading down to the northern horizon.

The summertime Milky Way overhead down to Sagittarius tends to get all the love, but the wintertime Milky Way is also visually rich and worth spending time on.

https://www.constellation-guide.com/pleiades-the-seven-siste...

You're probably right. I may have flipped the scale. I see most of what you describe in level 2 combined with significant difficulty being flexible. At the same time, he writes very well expressing his emotions and insights. He can handle basic things like hygiene, laundry and food prep if it's pre-packaged but has a hard time with emptying the dishwasher. Frequently when he does things around the house, he is watching videos on his tablet in one hand and using the other hand for the task.