pbmonster
4d ago
I'm not sure the people in the Snow Crash burbs actually share much community, but I guess I can see the splintering into smaller units - even if many of those are just franchises of some anarcho-capitalist mega-corp that collectively hires armed security. Sounded more like a thought experiment to me, along the lines of "what if every American suburb was a gated community that had cyborg pitbulls mauling tresspassers?" And American suburbs famously don't have that much actual social community going for them.
Also, absolutely read Anathem next, if you haven't already. It's by far his best work, and the one that actually has an (extremely utopian) solution to exactly that problem!
pbmonster
6d ago
Been reading my third Neal Stephenson novel lately
Which ones? I guess Diamond Age has that theme between the lines, but which others do?
pbmonster
6d ago
It's certainly both. If your grant success rate in 2025 is 16%, you just have to write 6 times as many grant proposals. Does that additional labor lead to progress? No, on the contrary.
But on the other hand it is absolutely true that the low hanging fruit are gone. Look at the first Nobel in physics: X-rays. Even in the late 19th century, a single motivated human could just go and make a cathode tube from scratch. Glass blowing, vacuum pumps, high voltage source, some simple metal work, silver bromide coated plates. It's far from trivial, but really, you could do it entirely on your own, and fast. Stuff like that is mostly gone now. You need hundreds of thousands of dollars just for the experimental equipment - because for 100 years, legions of people have tried doing frontier work with little money, and they still do inside no-name university labs all over the world. The frontier now needs hundreds of hours of work from an army of expert technicians across a dozen specialized companies just to do the first test setup. And someone needs to pay for that.
Or do you have another explanation? The reward for cheap and effective science would be enormous. If it were possible, somebody somewhere would be doing it, right?
pbmonster
6d ago
Exactly. If you train at a gym, that might mean first finding the right one. Some gyms thrive on full contact and the camaraderie of butting heads no-holds-barred, others are 50% women and half the time is spend on speed/coordination games like "find a partner and try to tap their knee or shoulder". Both ends of the spectrum might not (exclusively) be what you need.
The "up to" might be doing a lot of the work here. Some (many) weeks, those people spend all their days just writing grant proposals, writing/editing research papers, peer-reviewing other papers, preparing teaching, and answering emails. On those tasks, you could have an LLM do 90% of the writing. Still going to involve lots of prompting, rejecting output and prompting again. You can also have it do 90% of your literature surveys. It is better at search than the old tools are, after all.
The question is if this "up to 90%" is actually what "drives scientific discovery". Because when a grad student shows up with interesting measurement results, the LLM will do 0% of the thinking of what that means, what the updated hypothesis is, what direction the research is going to go in, and what potential papers this might result in and what other measurements are now necessary to test the current hypotheses.
Same goes for peer-review. The LLM can write the boilerplate "this is garbage unfit for this kind of journal". The decision that the paper sounds fishy and the data looks unconvincing is not coming from the LLM.
It’s exceptionally good for your brain as well; there’s whole layers of strategy and meta strategy involved.
Unless you get into full contact sparing. That's not good for your brain, at all.
I did kickboxing for a while, and spared with a boxing helmet. Still got rocked badly, and declined ever going to competitions just of because how bad sparing could get. But then again, I was a superheavyweight, and those have absurd KO rates in amateur competitions. Also, the head kicks make it worse, of course. So your mileage might vary.
But yes, just the exercise is so good. It has everything: speed, power, mobility, cardio, technique, tactics and strategy. And friendly sparing is tons of fun.
pbmonster
6d ago
Basically, the real world would turn into what you see in most MMOs – almost all women would stay women, but a significant minority of men would choose to become women as well.
I have always assumed the reason for that not to be trans-curiosity, but the well-known fact that men like visual stimulation. "If I'm going to spend hours staring at a wizard's backside, she might as well be leggy and plump. And if I'm going to have to worry about which amour to play dress-up with, there better be cleavage."
So, unsurprisingly, my estimate for the magic button pressing would have been 1%. 25% is unfathomable, even if the button also magically turns you 16. Because if it doesn't (which we have to assume, since age was never part of the discussion), the button would just trade sweet testosterone for a few short years of menstruation and then the horrors of menopause for a significant fraction of "all men", without any of the perks all those guys fantasize about.
pbmonster
10d ago
If you know the counterparty's strategy you can do better, and sadly if you know it's "Always Defect", the best you can do is to match it.
Well, yes, trivially.
The best strategy when playing a counterparty with an unknown strategy is not the best strategy against every possible strategy.
I think I don't get it. What's the difference? Is your point that "every possible strategy" contains some really dumb strategies and "a counterparty with an unknown strategy" must be assumed to be somewhat optimized?
pbmonster
11d ago
If the opponent's strategy is "Always Cooperate" or "Always Defect", the best strategy is the same for total payoff, and "Always Defect" for their own payoff.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but if we're actually playing iterative prisoner's dilemma against a variety of competing strategies (and we can't know what any given opponent is going to play), the "permanent retaliation strategy" (also called "tit for tat without forgiveness" - you cooperate until your opponent defects a single time, then you always defect no matter what) is optimal, both for individual and collective gain.
But yes, the "permanent defector" is not far off in points for individual payoff.
Berufsschulen are vocational schools. Around 50% of German students attend those schools after finishing high school for a few days a week while doing an formal 3 year apprenticeship with a company. Classically, all trades have vocational schools, but also careers that would attend college in the US (nursing, accounting, system administrators, ect.) have vocational schools in Germany.
Civil servants is another classically German thing. It's a large class of government employees that enjoy extreme protections (absurdly difficult to fire, must be allowed to work part time if requested, ect.) and benefits (very nice pension, child benefits, ect.) - often in exchange for working a job where you cannot easily find equivalent work outside of government service. So examples are police, judges, firefighters, district attorneys, building inspectors, tax inspectors, head administrative staff at the city/state/federal government, ect. And, somewhat controversially, public school teachers.
pbmonster
12d ago
Well, where are you going to live? Renting is infeasible (by design). Are you going to buy a different house that also has a fake and gay high price?
For many boomers, the answer to that question is "an assisted living facility/a retirement home". This facility then will charge both rent and service fees that are so absurdly fake and gay high, that it will be able to transfer the entire value of the sold house into the hands of private equity firms and the medical industry in just a few years. Just in time before anybody can inherit anything.
It's almost as if they designed the entire system in a way that explicitly allows private equity to drain trillions of dollars from the middle class.
pbmonster
12d ago
my pay will be substantially lower for a long while, AFAIK much more than 2 years
You probably have all the university credits necessary, so you're missing 1.5 years of accompanied teaching (with the seminar lessons running in parallel) and a few education science credit points. The latter can sometimes be gotten at the seminar itself, or you get them on the side at a PH or from a remote university. After that, you should directly qualify for civil service (if you're healthy, ect.). But most of those details vary a lot by state, so you need to do a lot of research anyway.
the job market for teachers here locally doesn't appear all that great, especially not for getting into the Gymnasium
Yeah, math should still be somewhat in demand, biology not so much. If you can somehow convince them into accepting your data science/programming/math experience as credits for computer science, you're home safe.
If you really want to teach, you can keep an eye on Berufsschulen. They also need math teachers and have way lower/different requirements.
- becoming a regular gymnasium teacher in math/bio and going for that sweet civil servant status. Mostly an option if I lose my position though, since the income is almost identical if not a little lower
This is almost certainly incorrect. If you go all the way to civil servant, differences in social insurance contributions and pension fund contributions result in ~40% more take-home pay from the same net income. Add in the generous child payments (especially if you have 3) civil servants get, and you should be +>50% ahead on (arguably) -50% of the effort. German teachers like to complain, but it's a very attractive path if you don't have any grand aspirations career-wise and like spending time with your kids. Also, you can live about as rural as you want, which might give you another 500k EUR lifetime advantage just because of housing prices.
But yes, the first 2 years would suck. Much lower pay, more schooling, lots of work as you prepare each course for the first time.
- data scientist, ideally medicine/bio adjacent, possibly remote, possibly international
Super dead labor market, in my experience. I wouldn't even try applying for jobs unless you have connections from your network.
- actuary or other insurance/bank statistical work
Solid career. Depending on the firm, getting the actuary certification might be entirely optional and not even required for career progression.
pbmonster
13d ago
Polymarket prices that at 12% at the moment, but that is absurdly high.
Interesting, I was wondering the same thing while writing the comment and my gut reaction was "10%". And yes, that is absurdly high. But there's no margin for error with the heat shield, and as far as I understood the reporting at the time the battery failure would also not have been survivable. Years ago, I'd have said NASA knows the risk models, and they wouldn't send astronauts on a P(death)=0.1 mission. But man, have they squandered their technical integrity and credibility on this project.
And don't get me wrong, the mission with those constraints coming from congress was difficult. It might have been impossible. But I would have expected to see high level resignations at NASA left and right until they got something that could make the trip to the surface and back without failing during tests.
Oh boy. I'm glad this is in Culture War and not in Friday Fun, because Artemis isn't very fun at all. I'm sure there's a culture war angle here somewhere, though.
NASA's mission back to the moon, Artemis, is slated to launch in less than a week!
No, it's not. Because Artemis can't fucking reach the moon. NASA made Orion to heavy and/or SLS not powerful enough to get there. It simply doesn't have the delta v for a moon mission. And they did that knowingly, from the beginning. And they paid more than a $100B for the privilege. Let me say that again: NASA spent 20 years and significantly more than $100B of American tax payer money to use 2010 technology to build a rocket and a capsule a whole lot less capable than Apollo 8 was 50 years ago.
Really, it is hard to understate how bad the Artemis program was (and is) managed. At this point, it's not a program to return to the moon, it's a program to ram tens/hundreds of billions of dollars down the throat of Lockheed, Boenig, et al. in exchange for a welfare jobs program in strategically chosen congressional districts. It's much more pork barrel than rocket.
The best summary of the entire sad situation is The Lunacy of Artemis, and Casey Handmer has several nicely detailed rants on why the Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbage, why cancellation is too good for SLSand why SLS is still a national disgrace.
The TL;DR (but really, you should read at least the first one if you care about the Moon mission) is: the rocket can only lift 27 tons to the moon (compared to Apollo's 49 tons). That's not enough for a moon mission, especially not if you make the new capsule so heavy. This is mostly because NASA has to reuse old Space Shuttle parts, e.g. the engines on the rocket. They pay $420M to take a single old existing engine out of storage and refurbish it, and then dump it into the ocean during the first flight evn though those are reusable engines. $420M is both more than an entire SpaceX booster (with 33 engines) and also more than those old engines cost to make in the first place ($40M). The capsule is a six seater designed for Mars. It now goes towards the moon with four astronauts instead. They didn't change the design much, so it is extremely heavy - a bad combination if you have to work with an underpowered rocket. This means NASA's plan had to change quite a bit. They can't make it to the moon, they can't even make it to a useful orbit around the moon (like Apollo 8), no, they have to make due with a more... 'lunar-adjacent' destination. It's called a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit, is really slow (and thus dangerous for manned missions since you can't really abort it if something goes wrong, you have to ride it out - for up to 11 days) and really not all that interesting since it's rather far away from the moon most of the time. NASA says they will fix all those problems before Artemis III by refueling the rocket at a new space station, something that will indubitably cost another $100B. Oh, and although they always wanted to do that, they forgot that the capsule doesn't have a docking hatch to dock at a space station in the specs. Changing the design to include that hatch has cost billions and billions of dollars, again. Also, the last time they tried to fly the capsule, they had catastrophic trouble with both the heat shield (of Columbia fame) and the batteries. They haven't flight tested both of those since, but are going to fly it with human guinea pigs on board next.
In the end, I'm mostly sad and angry because this clusterfuck has cost us the Mars sample return mission, and it might cost us manned space flight for the next several decades.
Now, for the culture war angle. I'm relatively far left-leaning. Universal healthcare appeals to me. But this entire story black-pilled me on universal healthcare in the US. There's just no way that a system that allows this much mismanagement in favor of Lockheed and Boenig would manage to drop healthcare costs when facing the healthcare lobby. Also, this seems entirely unfixable. This is a cancer that has long spread across the aisle, and it shows itself every single time the military industrial complex smells money. Feels like another real loss of state capacity.
I've always seen .5 g / lb as the benchmark for "minimum" for a semi-active person.
I would be very curious, too. I have a fun anecdote that makes me believe the real minimum is extremely low: I went vegetarian in my mid 20s, and because I did it totally uninformed that absolutely cratered my protein intake for at least 2 years. Rice and potatoes must have been my main sources of protein.
But I started out fit, and absolutely nothing happened. I climbed difficult rock climbs and progressed as before - slowly. I hiked 7000' of elevation in a morning and was sore for one day after. I destroyed people in beach volleyball and socker.
I only noticed because I was totally immobilized by an injury for weeks and lost around 15 lbs of muscle. Rehab took a year, and I obviously only started to build muscle once I fixed my protein problem.
So yeah, if you want to see the numbers go up, eat plenty of protein. If you're happy to just be active and fit, eat whatever macros you want. A protein deficit threatening (even high level) maintenance is almost impossible on a western diet.
I think it's enough for a seed, considering @Lizzardspawn want to do 1-2 funding rounds before the 2 years are up anyways (otherwise you'll never 5x your 1M this quickly).
Sure, you can't do the entire R&D up to (or including) production for the first order on that budget, but 5 guys can cook up something good enough for the first round of funding after a couple of months.
I'd be more worried about the idea in general. A sniper turret will not take out most types of drones, and it will be extremely vulnerable to airborne drones. I don't think most western states are in the market for something like that right now. They worry about drones and counter-drones, not anti-infantry. That leaves mostly autocrats looking to suppress civilian unrest, which is morally abhorrent and also not a huge market.
pbmonster
21d ago
This is really lazy, right? Trump could easily change the "reasonably genuine" wording and just have employers only submit real proof of citizenship/visa status when they resister for employer-paid payroll taxes. That's how every single other first word country does it.
And sure, even then you're left with is millions of people working without anybody collecting employer-paid payroll taxes of their work, you're dealing with millions of "independent contractors" and the standard off-the-books shadow economy. But at least then you can nail them all for tax evasion. Keeping millions of people off the books and hiding envelopes of cash being passed around is a whole lot harder than just going "oops, I couldn't possibly have known, that would have been discriminatory and/or retaliatory! It's the liberals fault!"
pbmonster
21d ago
I asked Grok about the details of hypothermia and found it was a somewhat less urgent situation than I imagined. The man likely had been outside for 1-2 hours and likely would have been dead in about 3 more. Grok gives a big range of 2-12 hours for death by exposure in similar situations
Grok thinks the man will make a full recovery. Probably today, he will be released from the hospital.
Grok is a narrow-sighted idiot. Hours in single digit temperature weather and wind means frostbite. Even superficial frostbite (skin frozen solid) will blister, require pain management and permanent wound dressing. Walking on superficially frostbitten toes is excruciating, and for a reason - it should be avoided unless for survival.
His fingers had a grey hue to them and seemed frozen stiff.
Likely deep frostbite. Dead tissue may take weeks to declare itself. If that's the case, he's facing certain permanent damage to his hands and possibly amputations.
Let's hope he had his hands under his clothes for some of the time outside, and that he had proper boots.
Something truly weird. There is some strategic resource in Greenland. And America wants it. Information is being kept classified in the hopes no one fights too hard for Greenland. Maybe alien base.
Maybe the USG has proprietary information on natural resources? Public knowledge is that 25 of the EU’s 34 “critical raw materials” have been found in Greenland. Maybe that's already enough? Maybe someone found some more deposits closer to the coast, under thinner ice?
The know deposits are extremely expensive to develop and mine, especially if you care as much about the ecosystem and indigenous opposition as most EU states do, but that might change. Maybe making sure the EU (and/or China) can't ever access those has long term benefits for the US?
pbmonster
27d ago
If it costs businesses money to be forced to hire Australians, and wins back some social cohesion, it's just such an easy policy to pursue in my mind.
Maybe I'm just so much more black-pilled than you are. If you're changing something and "it costs businesses money" that automatically means not only is this not an "easy policy", it's going to be an uphill battle. No matter where you are, one of the political parties will be "pro business", and this party will fight you. Because this is actually important. There's actual money on the line. "Social cohesion", "anti immigration vibes", "campaign promises", ect. are all pretty much irrelevant once the wrong people lose money.
And if the same change also, at the same time, disadvantages minorities and/or people struggling with paper work, elements from the other side of the isle will also fight you.
they fail. So far the only thing that comes to my mind is civilian aerospace. They are way behind, rely on western parts, doesn't seem to be able to be waned off them and everything is way behind schedule. And that in a moment in which the lead times for delivery of aircraft approach 10 years. The market is hungry, China wants to provide, but they can't.
Brian Potter wrote up his findings about the "China cycle" in commercial aviation here. I found his arguments convincing.
He argues the core issue is that going after Boing and Airbus is simply extremely difficult, especially if you want to go after Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce and GE at the same time: "One is simply the sheer difficulty of building a modern commercial aircraft, which is probably one of the five or six most complex technical achievements of modern civilization (along with jet engines, leading-edge semiconductor fabrication, and nuclear submarines)." There's many subtleties (Boing and Airbus don't do manufacturing and tech transfer deals with China, Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce and GE don't do that either and also don't sell SOTA jet engines to China, US/EU air travel regulators are not favorable to Chinese hardware, ect.)
pbmonster
27d ago
This is honestly the most baffling part of the american immigration system to me.
In Australia, we have a requirement for all workplaces to verify that a new hire has a right to work in the country. You provide your birth certificate or working visa, or other proof upon your first day at work while you're signing a document with your preferred bank account for your salary. This costs the employee and the business approximately zero overhead.
But it costs those Australian businesses collectively billions of dollars in (direct and indirect) labor costs. Hiring illegals would be significantly cheaper, after all. Which is why the Americans don't do work permit checks. Every push for legislation like that would be met with intense lobbying from employers in the stereotypical sectors (farming, construction, hotels, ect.).
But it certainly also helps that a faction of the blue tribe is also opposed to work permit checks, for different reasons.
Overflight of the zone above 18k feet is legal, which makes jumping to the "someone-lost-a-MANPADS-in-Juarez"-theory the obvious choice. Both the Stinger and the Verba have an effective ceiling a little under 18k feet. The interesting questions is how hard do you have to kick the cartels for them to fire one at everything that flies?
The other option would be counter-drone operations in that airspace, probably also against the cartels and their drone activity. But stranding tens of expensive commercial aircraft for 10 days would be a little absurd for something that should be easy to plan...
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