zamfi

Yes, yes, and you got it. Largely it’s DNA that controls development of neurons/muscles/etc. that mediate nursing, walking, and so on.

On selective pressures: human babies that aren’t born with the ability to nurse, or foals born without the ability to walk—because their in-utero development didn’t allow it—historically don’t survive, and thus don’t reproduce.

> a strawman is very different thing than contextualization

Yes, that was my point?

You seem confused, I am not actually saying anything about whether Latour is bad or not, and I honestly don’t have an informed opinion there.

Latour may well be bad, but an argument saying so that just attacks a straw man of his work is unlikely to be very compelling.

> It might be interesting to hear out the criticisms against Latour's way of reasoning, instead of dismissing it.

I’m not sure you read my post, it sounds like you just assumed its contents, which was not in fact about being free to ignore Latour, but about being free to critique him with or without an understanding of what he’s trying to say.

If you read it you’d know that of course I’d be happy to hear out the criticisms against Latour’s reasoning, but they’ll be much more powerful if they come with an understanding of what he’s trying to say in the first place.

Huh. No one is forcing you to do this. You are 100% free to not give even the slightest mind to Bruno Latour—or any other philosopher’s—writing.

The point is only that it’s easy to dismiss most philosophy because it’s easy to take a common reading, interpret words in ways the author may not have intended, and make them into a contradiction or other ridiculousness—but in contrast it’s hard to do the work to understand the context in which the author is writing, what the author is responding to, and what the author actually is trying to say through those words.

It’s fine to take the easy road here, it’s just not going to teach you anything most of the time—and nor is it going to convince those who’ve done the hard part of anything.

> …they'll provide the subsidies and incentives to cultivate it.

Incentivize it by…taxing imported manufactured goods, for example, to make the domestic manufacturers more competitive?

Yes, and indeed, this is exactly the argument used by the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, in which public defenders / nonprofit lawyers / rural nonprofit doctors’ loans are written forgiven after 10 years of public service so they are not saddled with a lifetime of debt they can’t pay off due to choosing careers in public service. You’re in a supposedly “lucrative” career with a high debt load, but choosing not to pursue the typical high-income pathway.

That program has many gotchas, but at least this reflects a recognition that debt creates incentives that society may not want.

Well, the OP did say “the bulk of” — some people, like you, are surely carrying debt for non-lucrative degrees.

But the pipeline of lawyers, doctors, MBAs, etc. is quite a bit larger than self-pay philosophy PhDs, and a large fraction of those professional degrees are full-freight, $70k/year (plus living expenses!) of pure debt.

What is it actually doing with all that compute? Is it every animated thumbnail? Is it scaling thumbnail images? Re-flowing the page 120x/sec? Mining bitcoin?

Anyone know?

I didn't use the phrase "feel good" but rent control can totally be justified on equity grounds: a policy that protects the vulnerable from (effectively) eviction by "market forces" (read: rising rents) over which they have no control.

That's not wrong, in the most direct sense rent control policies are doing that, but it's not the whole story either (as it sounds like you know).

I suspect some feel it's progressive in one particular sense, that it appears to allocate a scarce resource (housing -- but why's it scarce in the first place?) on the basis of something other than wealth: tenure (e.g., prop 13, rent control's caps on rent increases), involuntary--or voluntary--penury (e.g., section 8, affordable housing mandates), or some other notion of "deserving" (e.g., subsidies for housing for teachers, paramedics, etc.).

Maybe, but these are primarily antithetical when density doesn't increase.

It's totally possible to have housing be "affordable" (i.e., condos, apartments in multi-unit complexes) and "a good investment" -- buildable land close to amenities/jobs/etc. rises in value, and so selling to a developer who will add more units on that land can net the owner a solid profit.

The contradiction appears when you want the same units (i.e., SFHs in perpetuity) to be both affordable and appreciate in value.

Zoning also creates this "positive" (in the technical, not social sense) feedback loop, where housing is so expensive that it drives up the cost of any kind of local production, including housing, because labor is (now) the primary driver of construction costs in California.

That said, building codes also drive up housing construction costs: originally intended for safety, building codes now also enforce energy efficiency (including window size, insulation, etc.), accessibility, sound transmission, material selection (for reasons other than safety), beyond the usual structural design, electrical/HVAC safety, and fire concerns.

This is before we even get to planning codes (i.e., zoning) which has restrictions on lot coverage, etc. that end up causing stronger correlations between land prices and unit costs.

Not the big box, mini Mac Pro thing next to it. Might just be a scale model.

That "mini Mac Pro" thing (next to the Genelec speaker) could also be an external drive bay -- Macsales/OWS sold a silver one for years IIRC -- they now sell an SSD version of it that's not silver anymore: https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB3F81S128/ -- and I think the form factor may have shifted a bit.

The point here is that there is tons of money to be made in manufacturing those chips that Intel lost out on by ignoring mobile. That “Apple makes their own chips” does not alone mean Intel could not have profited from this — as indeed TSMC, ASML, and ARM are.

In traceroute’s defense, it is traceroute — for sure it doesn’t tell you anything about the devices that don’t operate at the IP level. Those devices either don’t affect the IP “route” abstraction (e.g., signal boosters) or do so in ways that end up plausibly visible in the next hop.

There’s a reason the network layer abstraction is so strong, and an analogy to CPU ISAs here that have a similar strength.

TCP, similarly, doesn’t tell you when packets are deduplicated/resent/reordered/etc. — that’s just not part of the presented abstraction. Want that? Use UDP.

Yeah, like almost every other central-city engineering office of that era, SF was initially a sales office that SF-resident ICs would sometimes work from on Fridays...and then more often, and then eventually teams wanted to move there, and then...and then...

Acquisitions.

> We live in the southeast US now, the climate is helpful for farming. I lived in Seattle for a few years and that climate would have been much harder to work with.

Because of (a lack of) winter sunlight? Or something else?

Some of these programs require household application, which may be to high a barrier for some students.

That teacher's support might be vital to a hungry 8yo whose parents can't/won't/don't fill out the form?

I suspect people come from different baselines here, which for some means saying "yes" more often, and for others saying "no".

But I think the parent's point is to "say yes" more broadly than just when the activity interests you; e.g., if the people are good, interesting people and there will be interesting conversation, the activity may just be an excuse to get together, and not its focus -- and it's too easy to evaluate just the activity alone in response to an invitation.

When “low-income” starts at 100k, though, 40k might feel very close to nothing.

Not an expert, but taking these side by side...it seems reasonable to conclude that AMOC is (as that source states) one of several factors?

Iceland, e.g., is warmer than Alaska, and that might change. Northern Europe in general is warmer than the PNW, despite the North Atlantic being smaller (and thus less buffering) than the North Pacific.

Seems unreasonable to expect the UK to end up like Newfoundland, or Labrador, if the AMOC shuts off, but "colder" seems in the cards.

Of course, all of this is completely armchair on my part.

Hmm, these aren't quite the same though, are they?

I was under the impression that ultimately none of that voltage change ends up as anything other than heat. (Despite voltage being "electric potential", that's only really meaningful in e.g., capacitors and batteries, not in circuits that keep switching.)

Sure, but also Italians make ice cream somewhat differently than Americans (at least, different proportions of the ingredients are more widespread).

"Gelato" can be both the Italian word for "ice cream" and be something different from what is typically referred to as "ice cream" in the US, no?

Agree with everything you say here. I don’t have a 9th grader (yet!) but I tutored for years. The interpersonal component of tutoring absolutely dominates over the content component.

I think the “this time it’s different” argument is grounded not in “better content delivery” or “cheaper than a person”—which I agree are 100% not winning strategies.

Rather, the argument is some form of “so brilliantly delivered, so charmingly interpersonal, made so relevant to personal interests that even the most jaded, disinterested, burnt out 9th grader can’t help but learn the material”.

We’re not there yet, but even old-school automated tutors were fine at content and cheaper than a person. What modern AI brings is all the rest of what makes 1:1 tutoring great.

That’s what Karpathy et al should be building, IMHO!

The studies almost always compare 1:1 learning with learning in groups, comparing two different modes of interaction with another human,

But it’s reasonable to ask whether an AI can (today?) be as effective as a human at delivering (or even identifying, generating) that personalized interaction.

It’s true that these markets are the huge ones today.

But there is another buyer that your post leaves out: parents. This is not the same as individuals/self-learners (the buyer is not the user, exactly) — but the buyer has strong incentives that align with student performance that are different than the others.

Historically, this has been a very challenging market to scale up well — exceptional 1:1 tutors are rare, and hard to train, they’ll be expensive and often form a relationship with their tutees that incentivizes disintermediation of any platform that tries to capture some fraction of the value by offering a two-sided marketplace (YC has funded at least one of these!)

However, AI has the potential to dominate in this market. Most tutors are actually not amazing, but 1:1 tutoring is just so much more effective than basically any other kind of educational context (two-sigma improvements!) that it doesn’t super matter. AI could be a much more effective tutor — at a cost substantially lower than a human tutor. Of course, wealthy families may still want to hire the well-pedigreed, role-model-level, truly exceptional tutors. But folks who are lukewarm about their private (or small-group) tutors may just give the AI tutors a shot—and find that they’re better than what they were paying for.

Or not! That’s what makes it a risky bet. :)

But it’s a large, $50B+ market today, and growing fast — not one to be discounted.

Sort of -- but basically no course is going to teach X and Y, if they're functionally equivalent ways to learn about Z, because almost no course is specifically about X or Y, it's about Z, and learning both X and Y isn't germane to learning Z, just learning one is enough.

As long as the companies behind X and Y both have a fair shot at sponsorship, this isn't really anti-competitive. It's literally a competition in which the companies compete for student and faculty attention.

Anti-competitive would be a company saying "you must teach X and not Y in your class about Z because you use Xco's mail services" or some other such abuse of one contractual relationship for an unrelated gain.