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Given how many people have failed to prove P=NP, and how strange the world would look if P did equal NP, it seems very likely that P!=NP. This would also help explain why it's so hard to prove P!=NP -- finding the proof is itself in NP!

Thus, I'm very skeptical of claims that P=NP.

The heart is fundamentally a pump. Are we not able to build a replacement? I understand it’s not simple at all, and that people have tried and failed in the past, but is an artificial heart something that we should be able to build?

As someone who is strongly wants to "get rid of cars and switch everyone to public transit and cycling" -- no one is talking about doing this in rural areas. Should we decrease reliance on cars in cities and focus more on alternative forms of transport? Yes. Will this work in rural areas? No, of course not.

It seems that crypto and blockchain-based systems may well hurt the standing of the US if they allow US adversaries to evade financial sanctions.

I wonder if US lawmakers would step in to try to shut down these systems. It may be politically very difficult since there is so much money riding on crypto now, and many US lawmakers reflexively support crypto in order to appear pro innovation.

It’s well known, but https://slatestarcodex.com/ was the best I ever found for just really interesting and thought provoking essays that changed my mind.

Your second suggestion is not possible. iOS Apps must be installed through the App Store. Hence, Ben's point in the article that Apple has ultimate control over this process.

> I'm 100% confident Joe Rogan will be removed from their platform

Really? I'm 90% confident Joe Rogan will not be removed from their platform. They spent 100M to get exclusive rights to his podcast, and their market cap subsequently went up 1B. The best future for Spotify is in aggregating podcasts, not music, and Joe Rogan is the number one podcaster in the world.

This isn't some minor player on their platform -- Joe Rogan represents Spotify's best chance at a future where they aren't just competing away profits against Apple Music. They aren't going to give that up lightly. Not to mention, they knew what they were getting into when they brought him on.

The author dismisses futurists’ predictions as ludicrous, without providing any evidence to the contrary. Robin Hanson has some crazy claims, but he thinks things through and is extremely willing to bet on what he believes in.

Just because something seems crazy, does not mean it is wrong.

> 2050, that super futuristic year, is only 29 years out, so it is exactly the same as predicting what the world would look like today back in 1992

The problem with this analysis is that the rate of change of the world is accelerating; the world is changing faster now than it was in 1992. Fundamentally, this is driven by the fact that all the changes from the past cause further changes, in an exponential process. Thus a straightforward linear estimate of the future will underestimate how much things will change in the future.

There has been. With work from home, people are spending way more time in their neighborhoods, and online. They’re simultaneously discovering that their neighborhoods aren’t very nice, and (through urbanist social media) that nice walkable neighborhoods do exist!

When you don’t have to commute by car to your job, you spend more time walking around your neighborhood. It’s nice if it’s a nice neighborhood to walk around.

In my senior year at Duke, I took her ML class (her first semester at Duke). She was an excellent professor, one of the absolute best I had while there. She focused heavily on both implementation and theory, which I found to be rare.

Her class became so popular within the add/drop period that Duke added a second section and also doubled the attendance for each section. I'm pretty sure she went from being supposed to teach about 70 students to teaching 300. Nevertheless, her teaching was top notch, and I learned more there than pretty much any other CS class, and still rely on this knowledge today!

I too am really glad she won this award.

It is quite common for engineers with Cynthia Rudin’s ability to earn > 1 million. If you have that level of ML skill you can lead teams at many companies for over that amount.

I believe it. I don’t mean to imply this is only true for America — I just didn’t want to overstate my case.

Perhaps once we get really good at asynchronous work, the opportunity will be on the table for one city to try to import substantial numbers of people from all across the world.

There is a huge opportunity left on the table by so many of America’s cities to, basically, build a great city that can scale, attract everyone, use taxes to provide public goods, rinse, repeat.

Unfortunately, none of our cities seem to be able to be able to grow without housing getting more expansive and traffic getting terrible.

Ah, okay, my apologies :) I read that as a synonym for "mcmansion".

Remote work could help to alleviate the pressure on housing markets in major cities, but mini mansions are the opposite of dense, affordable housing. Even if the price is cheap to you, the associated costs for the city — more infrastructure and roads — are high. We can’t further sprawl our way out of this.

I think the answer is yes.

Most of the people setting the remote work/in office policies seemed to be thinking that vaccines offered a path back to normalcy. Delta seems to have blown that idea out of the water.

It is possible that in the endemic covid world, there always remains a significant health risk due to breakthrough cases, especially for folks who are older or have comorbidities. Given that, it seems employers may face difficulty mandating people to work in person.

This is overly cynical. I agree that in general cooperation is very hard, and if things can be solved by a private entity, that is a good strategy. But the world has united behind causes before. A good example is the hole in the ozone layer. The world identified CFCs as causing this problem, and united behind the Montreal protocol. Now, the hole is shrinking and is expected to be closed by mid century [1].

I emphasize this because international cooperation is important to solve many problems. Let's not misrepresent the situation and pretend it's impossible. It has happened before, and we would do well to make sure it continues to happen.

[1]https://www.epa.gov/ozone-layer-protection/international-tre...

The problem is that a rule of thumb is about averages, not edge cases. For a really long retirement, you are going to hit a lot of edge cases.

The 4% rule was based off the Trinity study, which looked at 30 year retirements and assumed the retiree would deplete their principal. It is not a safe basis for a long retirement.

Agreed. People look at homes and things like light switches and blinds that have stayed the same for decades. These things seem boring, but the fact that they haven't changed is evidence of great design.

Smart homes to me have always felt like tech looking for a problem to solve.

Politicians gaming the system by promising short term benefits at the cost of long term gain happens alls the time. But, it's not quite so cynical as you think.

First, understand that while people definitely want short term gain, they also want long term gain. Most all people are decent to some extent, and want long term success for their family, community, country, planet, etc. So, keep that in mind, and then let's examine this:

> it's absolutely mind-blowing that there isn't an entire line around the corner of politicians pushing for higher minimum wage, free education, free healthcare, basic income, etc

There is widespread disagreement over whether this is a good idea in the short or long term. And, keep in mind, voters do want long term success! So, when half the country thinks policies like these would cause a descent into socialist chaos, it's not surprising that politicians can't win on these platforms.

Nevertheless, we are constantly dealing with the ramifications of policies politicians crafted for short term gain. The mortgage interest rate deduction is a great example -- politicians subsidized homeownership, which was very popular, and we are left dealing with the drastic ramifications of a totally messed up housing system. Similarly, guaranteeing loans to help people go to college -- very popular in the short term, but has led to the ballooning of education costs.

The difference between these policies, and the ones you mentioned, is that they passed during a period of relative national unity, so it was much easier to get them through Congress.

There are so many resources on how to make the most of the time we have. All sorts of philosophies, teachers, books, etc. Undoubtedly people would benefit from engaging with this more, but there is a lot of effort already going into this.

Anti-aging, on the other hand, has basically no resources spent on it, and would benefit everyone if we could figure it out. It’s definitely worth putting way more effort into.

It’s also not zero sum. We can and should do both.

I did my undergrad at a top 10 university in the US. At the time (around 2015), most students fell into either "come from extremely rich families" or "very poor students on full financial aid". This bifurcation has only increased since I graduated.

One thing I have absolutely hated, especially since entering the tech industry, is how many of my friends who came from poorer backgrounds were misled by academia into pursuing things like "education for its own sake" or "studying what you love", and subsequently missed out on opportunities to study something that could have changed the socio-economic trajectory of their lives.

It can be hard, at these universities, to see who has invisible safety nets. You might decide to major in education because, well, it changed your life! You look around and, wow, so many other cool people are also majoring in education, it must be okay. What you don't realize, though, is that half of those kids plan to go into consulting or finance or whatnot via their parents connections.

I do value learning for its own sake and I don't think the liberal arts should solely be the privilege of the rich! But for a lot of kids from poorer backgrounds who make it into good schools, pursuing a more vocational major is the best chance of making enough money to go on to change their circumstances in life. This is sadly a fact of reality, and those who deny it (such as the professors encouraging these kids to jump into history PhDs) are taking away people's chances at upwards mobility.

This is because Netflix, knowing Apple would take 30%, does not allow you to sign up via an iPhone app. Apple takes 30% if you sign up via iPhone, not if you sign up via web and then use the iPhone app.

Any in particular you recommend? I played around with them in college, we had to spend months building one. I would love to get back into it, preferably without all the hard work of building the printer this time :)

I'm not an expert, but if 51% of the existing hashpower doesn't want a change, it sounds less a 51% attack and more like miners voting against something that isn't in their interest. The whole point of blockchains is that the incentives are supposed to be aligned between miners and users. If that isn't the case here, it sounds like a problem.

I don’t disagree with you. I am an avid backpacker and really enjoy nature. Many studies show people have better mental attitudes when they can view trees daily, etc.

I’ll just note that there are a lot of different points on the spectrum between country side and concrete/glass metropolis. Many of these points are great places I would still count as cities, and they still allow for gardens. I am NOT arguing for us all to live in high rises in midtown Manhattan. I do think that we should build nice, dense areas that still have green space, while allowing humans to live close together to gain the increasing returns that make society great. Hopefully we cut down on cars and get the fresh air as well.

Cities are more efficient and sustainable. Most importantly, cities bring people together to enable cooperation, therefore acting as a multiplier on what is produced and generally making humanity better off.

What’s needed are better run cities.

Yes, the construction of a ballpoint pen could be made romantic. But I mean...it's pretty incredible how many humans collaborate to produce the ballpoint pen, millions of individuals cooperating in countless ways, producing an essential implement which is greater than the sum of its parts. No one involved could tell you exactly how the pen is made, and yet it's sold at a price so low we never think about it. There is a famous essay "I, Pencil" that details, and indeed romanticizes, this exact process.

You could cynically state that all aspects of civilization are incredible, so therefore nothing is. Or you could back up and marvel at the fact that out of nothing came something, out of an unthinking universe came self aware humans that literally took rocks out of the ground and reconstructed them so that they would think for us, and that we then used those thinking-rocks to cure diseases, enable near-instantaneous communication anywhere in the world, and literally launch people off this planet.

I would advise you to try thinking in the latter style, as life is more fun that way.

The idea is that it is not an empty silo. The thinking is that if your opponent wants to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against you, they'll need to target all your nuclear missiles with theirs, to prevent you from retaliation. If you have lots of missiles spread out in otherwise non-strategic locations, you can make it harder for your opponent to preemptively strike you, as they'll have to destroy all these random missiles to prevent counter attack. In doing so, they would be failing to target densely populated areas, which would lower the efficacy of their attack.

Not saying I agree or disagree with it. But, that's the logic, anyway.