Unrelenting pessimism without nuance is no more profound than unrelenting optimism without nuance, but it comes off as “deeper” and more “sophisticated” because of human negativity bias.
Dark, pessimistic, sad, tragic things seem superficially more profound for the same reason that people slow down when they pass a car wreck and true crime shows about serial killers are popular.
We are this way because it probably had evolutionary survival value. “If you mistake a bush for a lion you’re fine, but if you mistake a lion for a bush you’re dead.”
Whatever sleep does, it's something nature has had a tough time optimizing out despite the extreme vulnerability it creates and the sacrifice of a little under half an organism's waking time.
That should tell us it's something incredibly important that's hard to do any other way.
Edit: on the other hand... if Earth had two suns and rarely had periods of darkness, you wonder if maybe there would have been more evolutionary pressure to find another way.
Alternately, sleep is the optimal ultra-high-efficiency survival state and wakefulness only exists to give creatures enough time to get their affairs in order so that they can safely return to dormancy.
It's easy to think of sleep as a compromise to be defeated because we're culturally preoccupied with the achievements and pleasures of wakefulness, but that's really just us claiming personal preference for one narrow part of a holistic system that's just doing its own survival and propagation thing.
Consider trees, mushrooms, cicadas, snakes, or cats. Chilling out in low power mode as much is possible is maybe not a error to be fixed so much as it is an outcome of efficient design.
The default and optimal state of a life form is waiting and efficiently using resources.
Moving around, socializing and reproducing,
killing and eating, are all energy expenditures or necessary to be able to prolong the sleep-life. Annoyances, from the POV of the sleep-being.
Consider hibernation. Evolution went to great trouble there to maximize the duration that some animals can sleep for - and it's pretty clearly solely designed to save power.
Which doesn't mean that's the only thing sleep is good for, evolution doesn't believe in separating concerns, but it's definitely a thing it does.
"Hurry up and idle" for CPU design ended up being great for power efficiency. Nature came to the same conclusion for biological organisms a long time ago.
I wonder if we looked at really basic life forms like bacteria, would we find things akin to sleep at that level? What about next up in sophistication?
Seems likely like the need for sleep then selects for many social/group behaviors. “Solo self-found” is not really an option unless you’re really good at hiding or have some other tricks
Yeah. Nature is the ultimate form of science. At any moment, it's incorporating an infinite amount of science, most of which we likely haven't discovered yet, and may not discover for millions of years - if ever.
Nature developed over millions of years of trial and error.
One of my concerns about UBI is that it would just cause inflation to raise prices precisely high enough to cancel the effect of UBI.
You see this on a more limited scale when we do other things that subsidize demand. Give people assistance with home buying? House prices go up. Make college loans cheap and easy to get? Tuition costs go crazy.
You’re ignoring its usefulness. I can summarize documents in seconds, and have a portable research assistant that has memorized all human knowledge.
What should have destroyed peoples’ faith in the tech industry is infinite scroll addictionware, algorithmic feeds that promote trash because it’s “engaging,” or vapid scams like NFTs raising billions to do nothing but open casinos.
AI is a lot more useful than that junk. It feels like a return to trying to actually empower people.
Of course it has negative uses but so does everything. Make a hammer and most will use them to build things, but a few will bash someone’s head in.
Serious question: What documents include high-quality content but are too long to read and lack summaries written by the authors of the documents? None come to mind immediately. Research papers have abstracts. Book chapters have introductions. I can't think of an example. Are you referring to low-quality content that isn't worth reading?
I wonder how deeply connected all this politics of nostalgia is to the fact that birth rates have been declining for decades and populations are older.
Given the older population and the country’s history as a bygone empire I bet nostalgia is thicker in England than the US, but US side there sure is a lot of it.
A lot of MAGA is about making the country the way it was when boomers were kids (50s, 60s) to prime age adults (80s to early 90s).
There’s even a hint of genX nostalgia too. A while back I was hearing some IDW type railing about how “woke” killed comedy and it hit me that there’s a strong undercurrent of nostalgia for the 90s when comedy and pop culture were all about being an edgelord. The fact that edgelording is "out" is blamed on "woke" and they lament that "comedy is dead" etc. I'm not sure how much "woke" has to do with it. I think... well... edgelording is just out.
Change reminds people of their mortality and it always generates a backlash. You’re not young anymore.
Thank you. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to write “we don’t need the money but are saving for a rainy day” CEO talking points and press releases for companies that were < 90 days from not being able to make payroll.
That depends entirely on how you raise the funds. Yes, you can say "Here's the growth rate we'd get without your money - based on that, this investment gets you an ROI of x%."
With x% high enough, sure, you can get VC money without too many strings. (Also, reading the Series B post, they were planning to invest - just in organic growth instead of the usual growth hacking)
And if you read the Series C post, you'd know what they're spending on - GPU (and general) cloud interconnectivity.
There's really not much need to guess, Tailscale's financing announcements are about as open as you can get.
What is tailscale going to do with GPUs? It's about as far removed from NL interaction as you can get, I really don't see any sane AI fit. Maybe they are using them for AI driven dev work? Probably need to think more laterally.
Not necessarily. You hear plenty of stories of companies who raised money they never ended up needing to touch.
What matters is why. Is it because growth is so bonkers that your burn stays minimal/zero despite increasing costs? Or is it because you don't spend anything and thus can get by with stable revenue. VCs are very happy with the first, less so with the second.
VCs would always prefer you get to megascale with less money - the less you raise, the less they get diluted.
> Part of this extreme reckless tariff push is definitely protectionism for the fossil fuel industry.
Indeed, it's becoming very obvious that the US is slowly turning into a resource curse nation. Sad.
Of course US tariffs are only going to make those Chinese panels cheaper for the EU and the rest of the world, which will then be less reliant on US-sourced fossil fuels. In the long run, putting up a wall in front of the your beachfront property is not going to protect your house when the tide comes in.
> The move builds on tariff hikes finalized by the Biden administration in September that target strategic product categories from China
You can argue about whether tariffs are good or bad, but in any case there's a vast difference between "target[ing] strategic product categories" and bluntly hitting entire ccTLDs.
The Biden tariffs were balanced by substantial incentives to build solar manufacturing capacity.
edit to respond to dead comment:
The Chinese wasted way more money on Solyndra's than the US did. Most of their solar power startups were failures too. Yet now they dominate because they subsidized more than one and didn't give up after one failed.
Targeted tariffs to protect or foster certain industries are acceptable. Blanket ones are not.
And they should be set just high enough that the industry remains competitive while not allowing for price gouging. We know companies will seek to maximize their prices. So if a foreign competitor is selling for 8% cheaper, then tariffs should be no more than 9%. We know from experience that manufactures will sell at the same price as foreign competition and will pocket the difference.
They should also be gradually reduced over time. The goal is to have domestic industries become globally competitive. And that necessarily means that companies need to strive to improve efficiency so they can match or beat the prices of global competitors. If that can't happen, then maybe those companies need to go away.
The reason tariffs are bad in the long term is A) it incentivize global competition to become even more efficient; B) it encourages domestic industries to be non-competitive. So the industry being favored by tariffs will never grow into a global power.
So tariffs on solar panels are fine, so long as they come with other incentives to spur domestic consumption (to drive efficiency gains) and a plan to lower those tariffs over time.
Blanket tariffs are pretty much never good, the only good reason to institute blanket tariffs on a country is as a prelude to direct conflict. As it will provide a market incentive for consumers to replace goods from that country with a more expensive alternative.
After all, a blanket tariff on all the goods coming from a country is a type of economic sanction. So a country who puts tariffs on the goods of every other country in the world is effectively feeling the impact of the first phase of conflict, when allies come together and enact trade barriers with a country. And why to countries band together to push economic sanctions on an adversary? To hurt their economy.
So TL;DR: Biden solar tariffs - well thought out and likely productive. Trump tariffs - pushing yourself in the face.
In my model, the "current time" was intended to be passed in via arg, or gotten via a helper, failing that. Never system time directly. But also, yes - monotonic time only. Robotics code tends to never handle time jumping properly, and I've found configuring the system to properly intake time sources to be tricky.
Dark, pessimistic, sad, tragic things seem superficially more profound for the same reason that people slow down when they pass a car wreck and true crime shows about serial killers are popular.
We are this way because it probably had evolutionary survival value. “If you mistake a bush for a lion you’re fine, but if you mistake a lion for a bush you’re dead.”
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