roenxi

You pay market price for oxygen. It just happens to be 0 right now. There isn't any reason in principle that price can't change (eg, if you want to go underwater getting the oxygen will most certainly cost you something, if you want your air at a certain temperature or humidity that costs you too). If we set up a moonbase or something then it might well be that oxygen would cost something.

Much like how there isn't any reason you have to pay for food in principle. It could become so cheap and easy to produce, say, bread or cheese that it is available everywhere at no nominal cost.

So yes, you should. You already do, realistically.

> This requires that we accept that there is such a thing as a neutral procedure...

Yes, it does. And we live in a society. So by extension we do already accept that neutral procedures are possible and that we have achieved them.

The English Common Law systems and their derivatives are an astonishing success in achieving general fairness. People arguing against it have, with remarkable consistency, failed to come up with anything that reaches it's level of neutrality. In fact, normally people struggled to come up with general criticism beyond accusations that specific individuals didn't follow the procedures properly or relatively minor tweaks to the administrative details.

Neutral procedures are a solved problem, the tricky part is convincing the law enforcement system to do things by the book.

I quite like the article, but I think it is missing reflection on what other common models are and why activation energy is more helpful.

In practice the model par excellence is the humble linear model - put a bit more effort in, get a bit more result out. Increase the widget budget by 10%, get 10% more widget. People seem to default to that sort of thinking quite readily.

And then obviously if someone applies linear thinking to a fire hazard they're going to get really bad results, because once enough energy has gathered to spark a flame, reducing the available energy by 10% is not going to be enough to get the situation back under control.

There are really important non-linear situations - many involving soft skills. Relationships, reputation, motivation and the like. Having a nonlinear model for them is quite important.

Most people do try to live a life that contributes toward a positive future that we'll all benefit from, while choosing not to support the opposite of that. There aren't exactly large groups of people organising around the principle that they want everyone to be worse off. It'd be pointless and they'd get crushed; militarily if needed. Only very fringe groups organise around negativity. People aren't very good at bettering themselves & others but that is clearly the direction they're trying to go.

As for "care", that is one of those unreasonable expectations. You can't tell who cares by looking at them and it doesn't do anyone much good for someone to be caring but incompetent. We get a lot more out of hyper-competent people who don't care but nonetheless do a very good job of making the world better.

What's a "good person" exactly? There are many wildly different definitions.

People do generally want to be good people but it is a fairly basic don't-upset-the-neighbours form of good. You can't rely on them to consider any specific act as being good or bad.

Frankly speaking? It is because the people making people's influence operations the topic of conversation (at the national level) tend to be propagandists themselves. They aren't all that interested in a philosophical discourse trying to get people to make decisions in their own best interest or uncover the truth. They have a narrative and a job to do pushing it and they're perfectly happy to let temporary allies talk without interruption.

There's an interesting debate about whether that is helpful or not; the experience of democracy tends to be that your more at risk of getting high on your own supply when it comes to propaganda more than that an opponent is a risk.

If China stops publishing weights, that would suggest the US has been knocked down to 2nd place and it is likely that they will rediscover the "Open" in OpenAI for strategic reasons, or something like.

It's reasonably safe bet that there will always be someone on the planet with the means and interest to commodify the models. They don't seem very hard to make; we're swimming in options.

I mean sure but if we're just going to give people the money to buy food what is the complaint about big corporations charging more?

It isn't like anyone would be unable to afford food, because a welfare state would imply a standing agreement to buy everyone food at the taxpayer's expense if required. And it is entirely reasonable for prices to go up when there is a shortage, the people who built up stockpiles in advance need to be compensated for their foresight. Someone has to be stockpiling food.

If the plan isn't to stockpile food communally through a big corporation making a tidy profit for being well prepared in a disaster, and it isn't to stockpile it personally... what is the plan? There won't be any food.

There are very limited options here. Those two are, by far, the two best ones for reliably being able to access food. Someone has to build up a reserve. Literally, you should to be able to point someone out and say "this person will give me food next month, they've got a stockpile for this drought".

Ideally that someone who is very, very motivated to get it right and make it happen. Those big corporations charging extra are going to keep people fed.

> The world is bigger than your relatives.

I offer no commentary on the size of my relatives vs. the rest of the world :)

If you think that is going to happen, you can buy up some supplies and store them yourself. I have relatives with some impressive and substantial pantries because they're prepared to be snowed in for an extended period of time. Running out of food is possible the least novel problem humanity has ever encountered.

And what would you rather happen? If they don't store up a surplus then everyone will run out of food and prices will go up anyway. If there is less food because of a drought, prices are going up. If corporations start building up a stockpile then prices aren't going to go up as much as if there were no reserves.

TLDR; Yes. Good. It is a great day when there is food available at the local supermarket.

Being picky with words, you can be a manager of something other than people, it is the same broad skillset. Managing people has a few skills that are people-specific, obviously. But you can manage servers, manage widgets, etc.

Which makes it clearly distinct from leadership, because it is very hard to lead something that isn't alive. It is hard to lead a server.

> What I find striking here is that there are both fewer questions and fewer answers.

Assuming the ratio of answers per question remains the same (or drops because the answer quality raises) this is the sort of thing I would suspect.

It wouldn't even be theoretically surprising if the number of Qs & As on MathOverflow trend down purely because all the easy questions get answered. Wouldn't necessarily expect that, but because we can't really anticipate whether questions should trend up/down/sideways I don't think analysing MathOverflow is really all that interesting. Like the writer observes, kids these days are probably all over on Discord.

> Events in China do not retroactively change your solar panels or wind farm.

It can, capital depreciated continuously and there'd be an annual budget for replacing panels. If the new panels are much more expensive, we'd expect the cost to start rising.

Obviously everyone would rather be using solar rather than oil if there is going to be a war because the feedback loop is slower, but it is still affected by foreign events.

> This is in process now, but there are efforts by the fossil fuel industry to prevent that.

Maybe, but the environmentalists have been flailing and failing to stop the fossil fuel industry for decades, because people want cheap energy. If renewables actually work the fossil fuel industry will have about as much success stopping them, ie, none whatever. There wasn't ever strong enough political support for renewables to escape economics, but there is even less for fossil fuels. Nobody is in favour of them on an ideological basis.

The price of solar power is governed by the events happening in China. It just happens that the situation in China is pretty good because their military are the most competent in practice out of all the major players. At least so far.

> In addition to being cheaper...

It might even be cheaper, we're looking for the tipping point. But if it is actually cheaper to get power from solar energy, people will just switch to it at high speed. The reason the world runs on something like 80% fossil fuel is because solar has, so far, manifestly not been a cheaper source of energy than fossil fuels.

If you ignore the fact that people would have to go without energy then sure, it'd be great. But the practical reality is the downsides of oil are much smaller than the downsides of not having cheap, accessible energy. Which is why the world persists in using coal and oil.

This is somewhat funny when you realise the data centres are now going to start a process that looks very so slightly like daydreaming. Depending on the time of day they're going to be thinking about different things in a cyclic manner. They're going to be doing things like finishing a hard days work then kicking back to think about tricky math problems.

The government can sponsor a credential if that helps you? The libertarian position isn't that the government can't have a position on what the standard should be, just that people who think there is a more cost-effective standard should be allowed to use them.

Much like how you can hire a programmer based on that you think their work is good or they made a lot of money programming, rather than just limiting yourself to the people who went to some fancy university. If you don't feel competent at assessing programmer quality then you can exclusively hire ex-Google or MIT programmers or what have you and pay an absurd premium for the most credentialed US developers. But most people don't need to do that.

You can also buy from companies that hire licensed software engineers if you want to? The main thing that would stop people patronising licensed individuals is if there was no obvious skill gap between a licensed and unlicensed practitioner that justifies the price gap.

People don't need a government body to tell them to check for credentials. If people care they can ask (I had to give a copy of my degree certificate thingo to my employer a job or two ago, they cared that I was qualified). The whole and only point of mandating licensing is to raise prices for consumers.

EDIT

Just while I'm thinking about it, the law is expected to be easy enough for everyone to follow while simultaneously there is is an absurd legal fiction that only a licensed professional can talk sensibly about the law. It is internally inconsistent that lawyers would require a license.

There are famously capitalist countries that are monarchies (like the UK), so as written that has to be wrong. There isn't really a definition of what "capitalism" means, although we can be fairly confident it involves people owning capital. Arguably it means that the people who own the capital should control the lion's share of political power (which, coincidentally, is how the US works).

The thing that makes communism (and fascism to a lesser extent) anti-capitalist are that it rejects the idea people should be allowed to own and control capital. So there is a clear incompatibility with communism even if the exact nature of capitalism isn't clear.

You probably can just use Vulkan. Why don't you think Vulkan is an alternative? Can it not handle BLAS and memory access? What is a graphics card supposed to be doing that isn't efficient in Vulkan?

It is an outcome from over 400 data points. We're expecting to see events outside a 3 sigma boundary. In fact, 3 sigma is basically the 1:400 boundary. Strictly it is 1 in 370 [0] for anyone who takes Wikipedia at face value.

In the study they seem put the P value of the taxi driver outcome at <0.01 (in Table 2, although I admit I haven't read the thing especially closely). For 400 data points, we expect there to be around 4 values with a P value less than <0.01.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rul...

It is a company, it doesn't have ethics to align with.

The whole thing is marketing, they have to do some level of morality theatre to placate the pearl-clutchers.

The UK's culture on this stuff has been relatively famous since Orwell coined the term thoughtcrime. The major advantage the US has over the UK historically has been the oceans, but an interesting secondary one is the US was built by people who seemed to have a healthy fear of the extended groupthink sessions that the UK tends to fall into. It's always been something of a problem given how insular their upper class is.

The UK was an amazing leader on liberty in the days when absolute monarchies were the assumed default government, but their free speech standards are a long way from exemplary in modern times.

If we read OP's comment closely, it appears to be technically correct. I can imagine someone not upvoting it because it seems to be generic, but there isn't anything wrong or low effort about with it. And I don't see where the stats came from if he hasn't read the article.

But after the study controls for age the starkness of the effect more or less disappears (eyeballing Fig 1, the 2nd graph).

It turns out that there is a profession with a lowest risk of getting Alzheimer's (duh, one had to exist) and it looks like a slight outlier (it's the lowest, we'd expect that one to look like a slight outlier). As outliers go it isn't that impressive, it looks like it is part of a fairly boring distribution. We just plotted 400 data points on the graph, the 1/400 chance weird data point is going to look a little weird. We're actually just reading a lot into the fact that the 2nd data point in ambulance drivers which isn't all that convincing.

Not to knock the study, I'm sure it is a great study. Lots of science done. They do good graphs and all that. But the study appears to be telling me that Alzheimer's is random with respect to occupation and ideally don't spend so much time on the road if you want to live to see old age.

Fella has read the article, has an argument and some stats. What more do you want from a comment? He isn't running a study.

Besides, the point is a good one. There are a lot of professions. If we glance at the underlying study [0] Figure 1 suggests that we'd probably expect to see an outlier or two in that mess just through chance, we're expecting a few p<0.01. Taxi drivers doing unusually well doesn't seem especially impressive in that light, especially since it is one of the professions that seem to die off rather young and we might expect one of those professions to do rather well on Alzheimers.

[0] https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-082194

How did we get here from OS age reporting? I don't see how age reporting is going to stop any of those 3 things - or indeed any technical set of controls.

If the fear is kids communicating with people, I might suggest giving them a phone and an internet connection is a poor start whatever happens next. They're communication tools. They're going to use them to communicate.

"War crimes" is something of a shorthand for being involved in an aggressive war; they are a surprisingly minor influence on the discourse because they are small in comparison to the decision to go to war at all.

I think the more baby-steps approach to western cognitive dissonance is to at least get them to be consistent about when it is a good idea to go to war. I'm more than happy to get downvoted pointing out that killing 100s of thousands of Russians and welding them strategically to China was a terrible policy, uniting Asian manufacturing and resource giants is catastrophic for western power. But people were grumpy and didn't want to talk about realpolitik because the Russians are so evil.

Now we have the US attacking Persians in Persia for trying to govern Persia because the US sphere of influence covers the whole world and doing serious damage to the West's access to global oil markets and we have this muted and philosophical response from the powers that be. It isn't just immoral, it is also actively stupid - if we can tolerate this behaviour from the US, why can't we also tolerate Russia on a far smaller and easier to understand scale? How are all the sanctions and weapons deliveries to Ukraine actually justified in the minds of the people making the decisions? It clearly isn't a moral calculation and it seems to be stupid strategy.

If we got some thoughtful and transparent thinkers in power there'd probably just be less wars, they seem to be the fast path to poverty and the upside is hard to spot. There are serious questions about why any of the major conflicts right now looked like a good idea to the people in Washington and wherever NATO is in Europe. Brussels I suppose. Can we try peace and prosperity as a strategy?

Sure. There is no way that old mate in 1960 could have afforded all that stuff and thread ancestor is pointing out that people around today can't afford a 7 person family and have all that stuff in 2026.

So we've moved from a world where it was impossible to afford all that stuff and a 7 person family to a world where ... still can't be done. People have raised their standards to the point where they can't afford 5 children, savings and a lifestyle that they think is reasonable. Not much of a mystery there to interrogate. There has never been a generation that could afford the lifestyle they want and it appears there still isn't.

The modern equivalent to what the man had is what the man had. You'd need to be paid maybe a bit less to support a family like he had because everything has gotten slightly more efficient over the years. If you want to define things by means and medians, the median worker had a median lifestyle then and a median lifestyle today.

If you want much more than he had, you're going to need to pay much more for it. Bit of an obvious one.

If you're happy to live life to a 1960s standard, it'd be quite cheap. If I'm interpreting the stats properly [0], he expected to put two children through high school and the other 3 would have been contributing a lot to the family quite early on. It'd also be interesting to check whether it's legal to build the same apartment in Daly City's current regulatory environment because that isn't a given.

Plus, the US government at the time was less than half the size of the private sector [1] so we'd expect he was contributing less to dead-weight government projects and corruption.

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_104.10.a...

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Governme...