scottLobster

Odd that you mention that, China is afraid of exactly the opposite. Their systems are so centralized for surveillance purposes that an AI seriously breaching their systems could destroy their control.

Well yeah, abuse can happen. But the general principle of some people paying higher premiums than others because they're higher risk isn't a bad one.

If we mandate that insurers keep premiums equal for everyone, get ready for a lot of people to have zero access to insurance as they're deemed too risky to cover.

So we're talking about the complete destruction of the consumer economy.

Hard to see how Google or Facebook keeps their advertising models in that environment. There aren't enough construction workers and data scientists to buy everything.

Honestly I'd report it to the state insurance commission. Did they call out any specific issue with the roof at any point? Some kind of new code they were mandating an upgrade to or anything?

Why should safe drivers pay the same rate as people with multiple DUIs?

Why should someone who has an unpatched hole in their roof pay the same rate as someone who maintains their roof?

You think these guys care about risk?

If you get into a deep enough "convenience" spiral, you lose the physical energy to engage in things like reading a book.

I was once so depressed that I didn't leave my room except to use the bathroom for months, and in that time I developed lethargy so extreme that I couldn't even play causal FPS video games competently. My brain simply didn't work as well, despite having all the calories it needed.

See nature preserves that are funded by regulated big game hunting of the preserved nature.

It's a fun moral question. At what point do you give up trying to make someone/a population healthier and say "well if you're going to be this way, we might as well get some use out of you"?

Yeah, on a long enough timeline we should be moving away from fossil fuels as much as possible, but in the meantime fracking has allowed us to substantially lower carbon emissions without massive societal upheaval. It's like equating hybrid cars with traditional ICE vehicles. Sure they both have problems, but one has a lot fewer.

And no, renewables + batteries and nuclear couldn't have displaced coal precisely due to a lack of money and political support. Why are those constraints any less important? The goal isn't just to build renewable tech, the goal is to build a functional society that uses renewable tech. There also is a technological constraint here, fracking became viable in the early 2000s before modern battery and solar tech existed at its current price point.

No, but we get so much natural gas as a side effect of the fracking that we literally can't distribute it all, it's effectively free. Which is why natural gas plants have been displacing coal plants for the last 20 years.

You... really need to read more before forming your opinions

You can't be worried about fracking and coal at the same time in the US. The former is the reason for the latter's demise

Cool, let's make that timeline a step function with the risk of cancer being effectively zero until 200 years of life and cure cancer.

In your experience, how do people typically respond to crassness? That's how they'll respond to your argument.

To be completely blunt, fuck your bluntness. You clearly don't care about climate change all that much if you aren't willing to even attempt effective messaging. Go do your revolutionary cosplay with some lesser topic

Yes, because the endless shallow catastrophizing of climate change has been famously effective messaging!

You cracked the code, let's just try to equate climate change to Hiroshima! That'll convince people!

Likewise, and I wasn't trying to invalidate your approach. Raising independent kids who understand the imperative of building their own lives is absolutely necessary regardless of economic conditions

As a father of 3 kids under 5, we bought our house 2.5 years ago and it has appreciated so much that had we saved every penny for the last 2.5 years we couldn't have afforded it today.

It doesn't matter how high performing your kids are if no good opportunities exist. So while we hope the world will allow our independent, high performance kids to succeed on their own, we're planning on having to provide unique opportunities via resources/connections ourselves to make that happen. Accordingly we're treating our house as something of a family estate, to be held in perpetuity and they can live in as long as it's good for them. It's not about keeping them as forever-children, it's about providing a base with a secure perimeter from which they can marshal their resources. For instance, we're right in the middle of two major metros. So if they land an unpaid/underpaid but prestigious internship in one of them, they won't have to worry about housing.

The point of the article is that most of what's being left is low economic value. When my great aunt died she had a collection of painted glass/plaster birds (not by any famous artist or anything, just mass produced stuff) that had been sitting in display cabinets for decades and nobody wanted.

It isn't an artifact of modernity that people don't want stuff like that. And as for stuff that is an artifact of modernity, the generation entering their 80s today lived through the widespread adoption of color TV, the moon landings, the space shuttle, cable TV, mainframes, PCs, CDs, VHS, DVDs, the internet, cellphones, smartphones, and freaking microwaves, never mind all the advancements in autos. You'd think someone with that lived experience would understand that times change and their kids might not want all their old stuff for the same reason it's been sitting unused in their garage/basement for decades.

My diagnosis is it was boomers who wrote the script for "The Goonies", specifically the line "Goonies never say die!". They came up in an era where rampant consumerism was encouraged and even directly subsidized as a political policy, hell it was how we beat the commies! Hard to be a good consumer past a certain point if you're too aware of your own mortality.

The long term benefit is that there are more developers with CUDA experience available to hire than there are with any of the "hard ways" you mention.

Not saying you're wrong, but my career got a lot less frustrating when I started focusing more on the product and less on the ergonomics of the implementation. If you need to build a house and the customer isn't willing to pay for brick, you use vinyl siding.

For most of human history we were riddled with parasites and children would appreciate being less riddled with parasites.

My wife and I are both the youngest in our families, and all of our extended family uses us as a dumping ground for stuff to they're too guilty to throw away or donate. About 10% of the time it's something actually useful, 90% we already have a better version of whatever it is or simply don't want or need it.

No, I'm not taking my father in law's perfectly good TV. I have a TV, and the one he bought was mediocre at best when it was new.

That's also the argument for payday loans and subprime lending. I have yet to hear of a poor person's life being improved by by access to credit at 20% interest, aside from the circular argument that easy access to credit inflates prices for everyone to the point where if you take the 20% interest loans away poor people actually won't be able to pay in cash and will demand it back because that's easier than demanding higher wages.

At a certain point you're just asking the consumer "how much are you wiling to suffer before you go without? Let's find out."

TDIL my homebuilt Plex media server is more strongly encrypted than a Flock Camera

I'm not that old, but literally no engineer I work with is "overwhelming pro-AI". Befitting engineers, they understand that AI is a tool and while it has its uses, it also has its limits. The enthusiasm that exists stems from AI solving actual hard engineering problems in front of our faces, but everyone using it has also encountered AI doing something very stupid as well.

Even our management is pretty honest about this. Our in-house AI platform running near-frontier models from the larger vendors requires manual confirmation of every command executed on a company machine. It's tedious, but aside from establishing a clear line of blame if the AI does something screwy, it also forces you to step through the AI's analysis which can be quite educational.

The alternative to protectionism is Chinese-style industrial policy. Which necessitates Chinese-style "we don't care if you're a billionaire, you will do as we say or men with guns will make you" levels of governmental control. Which I'm not sure any of us really want, as satisfying as it would to watch these CEOs get publicly re-educated.

They aren't patriotic and they don't really care about competing with China, they fancy themselves princes and are playing on the silents/boomers in charge being irreparably stuck in the Cold War.

Is it so bad to have another entrant, especially with the resources Google could bring to bear?

Imagine if the Apple EV had actually happened, you think the EV enthusiasts would roll their eyes like you are?

All those materials with the exception of animal furs are commonly found on or in the ground. Given the relative lack of multistory buildings throughout our history, that's basically just making the ground a few inches taller. The ground itself is highly varied as well, with various combinations of rock, dirt, sand, etc.

I was thinking more that in the developed world most people have much more separation from anything resembling the ground, both in terms of materials and physical distance that would substantially alter any electrical characteristics.

In the off chance I win the lottery I intend to fund serious robust studies of minor stuff like this. Would be the easiest placebo ever, just internally disconnect some of the mats.

No, it fits an existing pattern. Something commonplace in our natural environment that we adapted to over millions of years and exerted a non-obvious influence that wasn't scientifically verified until recently. Dietary fiber is but one example.

I'm not saying that's "evidence", or that the posted study is valid, but I'm also not aware of any robust studies demonstrating no difference from placebo. A lack of good data is neither positive nor negative.

As for dietary fiber, it wasn't broadly seen as useful for anything other than constipation until the 1970s when it was shown that increased fiber intake reduced colon cancer risk

To play devil's advocate, as a species we've spent the vast majority of our existence sleeping on the literal ground. It seems plausible there may be some adaptation to the electrical properties of being at the surface vs ensconced in synthetic materials above it.

Granted there's no evidence for that as of yet, but there was a time when fiber in food was reasonably seen as just inefficient waste that couldn't be digested and so had no benefit, that's part of how we got Wonder Bread and the obesity epidemic.

Part of getting older is you leave the civilized bubble you were raised in and witness literal crazy.

I was walking down the bike path outside my apartment complex some years ago and a lady started a conversation, which started off normal but quickly turned to Reiki and after a few minutes she ignored every social hint to change the subject and just REALLY wanted to talk about energy pathways, life force and other woo-woo shit until I had to physically cut off the conversation by awkwardly walking away.

Also Steve Jobs died because he tried to cure his cancer with fucking fruit.

So yes, I have zero problem believing a minority of sheltered, internet-brained GenAlphas out there are doing "private podcasting". Statistically every adult has met at least one person who secretly enjoys eating literal shit.

If we've learned anything from the last year, any such adult won't be listened to. Trump's a bully, he feels that America should use whatever hard power it has to enforce its interest and damn the soft power or the 2nd order effects that the "adults" care about. He also feels that Europe is or should be America's vassal, and is annoyed that they don't go along with his every whim. Seizing gold reserves would likely be an easy way to bring an uppity vassal to heel in his mind.

The long term ramifications won't even be considered.

One of the crazier ideas to address the deficit is revaluing gold reserves and throwing them at the deficit. Does anyone really think the Trump admin wouldn't consider seizing foreign gold reserves as part of such a move?

I know that instinctively sounds crazy, but this administration attacked Iran without a plan for their closing the Strait of Hormuz, and tariffed uninhabited islands based on an AI-generated list.

They're rational, but they're aggressive and dumb. Treat them as you would treat a guy who starts bar fights; one strategy is quietly moving to the far side of the bar, which is what this appears to be.