ryandamm

Or even better, The Economist's "Big Mac Index":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/big-mac-i...

Yeah I think this might actually be backwards; the Soviet Union had explicit production targets, and (iirc) in like the 70s they actually had more industrial output than the US. Remember the "missile gap," when the US was concerned that the industrial might of the USSR would bury the US?

But the output was mismatched to demand; it was a classic example of "when the measurement becomes the target, it ceases to become a good measurement" -- the centrally-planned industrial targets were inefficient, so a lot of that industrial production went to waste.

And to be fair, this is what's hard about economics: you can't just count tractors, or tons of steel, or whatever, as the output of an economy. Because every marginal ton of steel matters a different amount based on demand. The genius of capitalism (yes, I said it!) is it is an extremely elegant system for optimizing an incredibly high-dimensional system with a slippery, dynamic cost function, by incentivizing a bunch of independent agents to collaborate in price setting (and therefore sending signals about production via pricing, vis a vis supply and demand).

This is also why China's economy has done better than the USSR; let's not forget that Deng Xiaoping's "limited market reforms" helped unleash the modern Chinese economy. The structural issues in the Chinese economy now stem from the lack of development of consumer demand, which does echo some of what the USSR struggled from. But China has come very far; the criticisms of its current economy that I like best are well-articulated by Michael Pettis, fwiw. But I'd encourage you to do your own reading and form your own opinions.

I don't think my point was straw-manning the article. The article directly conflates economic output with manufacturing output, by using manufacturing signals (like power consumption!) as a corollary for some hidden, Real Economy.

That's crackpottery. I was succinct in my criticism, but there is plenty of room for elaboration.

If the essay instead took those economic indicators and delved into why manufacturing output should matter more than other output in determining the Real Economy, then hey, we've got an essay to discuss. But just eliding that and saying "manufacturing is real because atoms are real, everything else is b.s." -- that's not really an argument, that's just laying your biases extremely bare. Which I pointed out.

That said, geohot is close to some real points, I just don't think he has the background to articulate it rigorously. And for the record, I do think the US economy is entirely too financialized.

But again, that's a different -- likely better -- essay.

I think America in its best expression is an amalgamation of many different backgrounds and attitudes. Even differing opinions on the functioning of democracy, though I personally think some opinions denigrating democracy are a bit out of bounds and "unamerican" -- though that's obviously a "no true Scotsman" argument, I'm sticking to it.

I guess I'm just arguing for a more expansive view of what constitutes an American. If it was some precious fragile thing that gets diluted by immigration and threatened by cultural mixing and new ideas, well...

Oh... darnit.

Economics experiments are actually a thing. You can have natural experiments, or you can uncover patterns in data, or you can try controlled experiments (in microeconomics), though that sometimes just feels like applied psychology. I dunno, I've never formally studied it.

But I have read NBER papers, and can confirm that there is real research. It's not a hard science, but among the social sciences it's pretty rigorous, and often very quantitative. I know how this crowd likes it quantitative.

That's what PPP is meant to measure.

Also, "I become richer just because I think I'm richer" was actually a thing Donald Trump once said in a deposition:

"My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings." [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrumpNation#:~:text=During%20d...

That's a fair counterexample.

In that case, you could argue that "true GDP" didn't change at all, merely our measurement of it had error. But pretty soon you ask 'well, what is the real signal?' And it's turtles all the way down.

Again, economics is weird, but perhaps interesting because it's weird. (I'll confess I didn't care about the field at all until it suddenly got very interesting in ~2008.)

If you can truly come up with an objective measure of wealth, I believe there might be a (quasi) Nobel Prize in economics for you.

The reason economics is hard, in part, is that there isn't some core firmament you can rest on; there is no fundamental, provable truth. And yet, with fancy statistics and clever experimental design, you can still make intelligent statements and understand the world better.

To me, economics is the field with the purest expression of "all models are wrong, some are useful." Which is actually sort of cool, if you let it be.

I have a lot of respect for economists, I know several.

They are among the most rational people you shall ever meet. And they are very aware of how incomplete their tools are. But they do a lot with such tools that is worth knowing.

Two quick thoughts… one, because every transaction in theory happens because the purchasing party values the good or service more than the money, every transaction does — in theory — create wealth, velocity of money is sort of measuring a proxy for growth. But I agree it’s weird.

Second, “GDP/watt” is absolutely an economic metric, and it captures something about energy efficiency but also the mix of an economy. Software and services scores highly; aluminum smelting does not.

Arguing that manufacturing is strategic is not the same thing as manufacturing being “all that matters in an economy.”

There’s a logical fallacy in your rebuttal.

China has major structural weaknesses in its economy that are currently overshadowed by the US cr*pping its own and its allies’ pants.

Specifically: there is not much of a home grown consumer economy; they have driven growth too heavily on exports and infrastructure build, leading to a massive overhang in building, a housing bubble that is teetering dangerously close to unwinding, and a major shortage of domestic consumer demand.

The Chinese people should be richer; the fact that they export a lot is a symptom of the failure to build up the household sector so domestic demand partly balances investment.

Again, read Michael Pettis’s “China Financial Markets” blog at the Carnegie Endowment:

https://carnegieendowment.org/china-financial-markets

I prefer my economic takes from economists, or people who actually study these things.

-there is more to an economy than manufacturing. Using manufacturing metrics to rate an economy is like scoring a soccer game based on how far your players run: in some contexts correlated with “winning” but in others it’s not. -gold is not a good currency or basis for monetary policy. -these ideas only sound self consistent without economic context.

But solution point 1 — brain drain the rest of the world — is an absolutely first rate policy. The fact that the US requires newly-minted PhDs educated here to get a different visa or leave is absolutely self-defeating. We should be welcoming skilled immigration from everywhere.

For my money, you’re better off reading Krugman, Brad Delong, and (my personal favorite) Michael Pettis. I’ll read Geohot when it’s about engineering or self driving cars.

I saw this at a DSO* presentation ("Darpa's Darpa") back in ~2018. Hope they've gotten some early traction, that was some of the least wild crap that was being presented.

My company was pitching holographic cameras, and we weren't scifi enough. The investigator wanted to know if we could do hyperspectral 3D imaging from something the size of a sugar cube. ("Uh, no?" was our response.)

* Defense Sciences Organization: https://www.darpa.mil/about/offices/dso

FYI, my colleagues in the past have used Metashape, if you're in the market for an OTS solution. There is also Epic's RealityCapture; I have not used either one, but as far as I can tell capture density and quality matter a lot. For any solve, get good light (outdoors preferred mostly for intensity), and shoot a lot of coverage. If you can use a DSLR (competently) that might help, though today's mobile phones are quite good. If using an iPhone, shoot RAW (Android may have something equivalent?) -- small scale compression artifacts contribute noise to the solve.

And good luck, whatever direction you take this!

That’s going to depend a whole lot on their budget, your capabilities, and the final requirements — is this being used for visuals, or metrology?

I have suggestions for getting visual fidelity but if you’re looking for an explicit 3D model maybe that’s not what you’re going for. (There are new approaches like NeRFs and Gaussian splats that don’t use traditional 3D formats, but look truly great.)

You could try generating per-view depth maps, going to a point cloud and meshing from there. (I suspect splats may reduce your accuracy as an intermediate.)

I’m not aware of a fully-baked workflow for that — though it may exist. The first step has gotten really good: the recent single-shot AI models for depth are pretty visually impressive (I don’t know about metric accuracy).

The ones I’m aware of are DUST3R and the newer MAST3R:

https://github.com/naver/dust3r https://github.com/naver/mast3r

Good luck!

Walgreen’s was closing stores anyway and used the pandemic shoplifting as an excuse… but it was never the actual reason.

Crime is at historical lows.

Except for leverage... but the general point remains that the upside is capped and the downside in theory is not.

I'm hardly an expert, but when I switched to lead-free solder (for the same reason, had a young kid around), the only change that helped me was soldering at a significantly higher temperature. The lead free stuff still doesn't behave quite as well as the leaded stuff -- hey, lead is useful! -- but I do feel a lot better about my garage. Though I did backslide when I had a project that required about 500 manual solder connections; after a few days of frustration I guiltily went back to lead, briefly.

Red has two cameras that cost less than $10k.

I was told by a Microsoft researcher that it will unlock currently unsolvable problems in chemistry, weather modeling, materials science, fusion and plasma physics, drug development… the list went on but it was really long. Most advances he cited would result from improved simulations, iirc.

I don’t recall enough of the conversation (circa 2019) to remember anything about the properties of the problems it helps solve, so I can’t help generalize. Sorry.

I don’t think you get much iron in your food from seasoned cast iron; the polymerized oil is an impermeable barrier. We have a lucky fish and it has what looks like rust all over the surface because the metal is directly exposed to the cooking liquid.

That’s not a fair comparison, The New Yorker has always had a different relationship with its writers. A freelancer who writes for The New Yorker is likely a highly respected journalist/author/other luminary. Their staff writers are, I believe, technically contractors as they’re not W2 employees.

Contractor-written slop at these content farms, as described by TFA, have nothing in common with how content works at The New Yorker.

No, that still violates thermodynamics.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon

… which is usually mediated by electric field interactions, involving virtual photons.

Right?

I think the barrier to commercialization is the lack of demonstrated economic value to having push button splats. There's no shortage of small teams wiring together open source splats / NeRF / whatever papers; there's a dearth of valuable, repeatable businesses that could make use of what those small teams are building.

Would it be cool to just have content in 3D? Undoubtedly. But figuring out a use case, that's where people need to be focusing. I think there are a lot of opportunities, but it's still early days -- and not just for the technology.

This is spot-on. Note that the aperture on the camera was quite large, I want to say on the order of 100mm? They sourced really exotic hardware for that cinema camera.

They also had the "Immerge," which was a ~1m diameter, hexagonal array of 2D cameras. They got the 4D data from having a 2D (spatially distributed) array of 2D samples (each camera's views). It's under sampled, because they threw out most of the light, but using 3D as a prior for reconstructing missing rays is generally pretty effective.

But I also understand a lot of what they demoed at first was smoke and mirrors, plus a lot of traditional 3D VFX workflows. Still impressive as hell at the time, it's just that the tech has progressed significantly since ~2018.

It's more expressive than mesh-and-texture, which is the default: it can represent things with poorly defined edges or transparency. Also, because it's solved via GD, you tend to get better fidelity than traditional photogrammetry that relies on MV correspondence.

But also you're just throwing a ton of primitives at the problem; high quality scenes typically have millions of splats. That's a lot of data, so it's no wonder it can be pretty photorealistic. (Still impressive, though.)