roystgnr
1d ago
My first thought is "brilliant; I'm going to buy some watercress seeds now and see how they grow for me", so thank you. How big do you let the plants get before you harvest?
My second thought is that there are a ton of pros and cons for outdoor hydroponics, and I'm not sure where they balance out.
On the one hand it could be better than soil planting because you have full control of pH and nutrients and drainage and you shut out weeds, and better than indoor hydroponics in most locations because you get free full-intensity sun and natural airflow and insect pollinators.
On the other hand, you don't get any more control over temperature and diseases and pests than you do with soil planting, and if it's hot enough in your location then you probably need to keep an eye on your water tank more frequently to account for extra evaporation, so you lose a little of the benefit of not having to water as often.
I guess the big question is how much you want to grow versus how much space you have in full sun. If you have a bunch of ground that's not needed for anything else, you might as well put up a raised bed and plant there. If you don't have that, but you do have a nice south-facing wall or fence, I think I'd much rather go vertical with a hydroponic system than with traditional hanging planters.
Psychologically, I think the extra work in setting up an outdoor system might make a big difference to me. When I bury a bunch of seeds and half the crops grow great but half the crops die off, it feels like a fun experiment. But if I'd built a big hydroponic system instead of a few raised beds, losing half of the result would have felt like a failure. I can't always get good output from indoor hydroponic plants, but since the "growing season" is very long and the "cleaning season" is far shorter than even our mild winter, I can just replace underperforming plants with new plantings and that doesn't feel like a failure either.
roystgnr
1d ago
difficult to observe because of the way it does (or doesn't) interact with regular matter.
Difficult, but not impossible. The clearest candidate so far is the Bullet Cluster, where we can see the shock wave from regular matter in the galactic collision, but we can also see the lensing from a bunch of something invisible in EM (i.e. "dark") that is a major source of gravity (i.e. "matter") that managed to shoot through the collision without itself colliding so much.
has never been observed
We could argue about what counts as an observation (have I ever really seen my kids, or have I only seen the photons bouncing off them?), but we've observed something that looks dark and acts like matter, regardless of how precisely we can identify it in the future. There are other theories that try to explain galactic rotation curves (the original motivation for theorizing "dark matter") with e.g. changes to how gravity works at long ranges, but they have a much harder time explaining the Bullet Cluster.
dark matter was invented to explain the otherwise unusual expansion of the universe
This was the motivation for dark energy, not dark matter. Dark energy is a much better candidate for your metaphor here. If it's uniformly distributed in space (which it seems to be on large scales, plus or minus 10%) then the volume of the Earth would include about 6 septillion kilograms of matter and 1 milligram of dark energy. Our best candidate for dark energy right now is probably "Einstein's equations are still consistent if we add a constant, so maybe that constant is super tiny instead of zero", and even that runs into a problem where, when we try out different particle physics theories for predicting the constant, we either get "zero" or "A septillion septillion septillion septillion septillion times larger than what we see". This definitely feels more like an "invention" than a "discovery" still.
I'm not sure you want to take the "ha, scientists invent invisible things too" metaphor too far, though. The examples get cooler than the Bullet Cluster. When scientists invent such things we sometimes get discoveries like neutrinos (predicted just to try to balance particle physics equations, and nearly impossible to see because they barely interact with anything, but we can detect them now), or the planet Neptune (predicted based on irregularities in Uranus' orbit, and essentially discovered by an astronomer "with the point of his pen" before we could figure out where to point our telescopes). Even when they fail at it we still get things like General Relativity (which explains irregularities in Mercury's orbit that were once hypothesized to be due to a planet "Vulcan" even closer to the sun). Neutrino detectors are still huge and expensive, but now anyone can see Neptune with a home telescope or use the corrected-for-relativity GPS system in their phone.
Could miracles ever work the same way? You've learned about the Miracle of Calanda now; perhaps we could convince people to start praying for amputees, and we'd see claims of miraculous limb regrowth rise to match claims of e.g. miraculous cancer remission? Would you expect that to work, and start trying, and report back to us after you see it start working? I'd be ecstatic to be proven wrong like that.
roystgnr
1d ago
If you're planting annuals like most vegetables and flowers, then just try a little of everything, and see what survives to figure out what to focus on next year. I'm also in the heat, and some of the stuff that grows well like peppers and okra was predictable ... but also I had very good luck with some plants like green beans and horrible luck with curcurbits (cucumbers, melons, pumpkins, etc) and I still have no idea why.
Basically everything we eat loves full sunlight if it's well watered; you can get away with a little shade, but I think I lost my strawberry patch to too much shade one year.
Basically everything hates drowning, so if you get even occasional heavy rains you'll want to worry about drainage. Raised beds are popular for that, though going high with them means you either need to have or add a lot of topsoil. I only went up a few inches for my first raised beds, and I still wonder if that (maybe indirectly through promoting fungi?) was what finished off my vines and my potatoes during a wet period.
If you have trouble remembering to water, getting a drip system on a timer is a reasonable solution. You still have to kill weeds, but the timing on that is more flexible.
If you just have trouble with frequent watering, cheap LEDs have made hydroponics an affordable hobby for growing herbs now, not just "herb". Topping off (and fertilizing and adjusting pH) has to be done about once a week.
roystgnr
1d ago
It's way past that time of year for me, but I've finally got peppers and tomatoes almost ready to transplant. I may get a few other outdoor veggies to go with them.
I'm doing a much smaller outdoor garden than I have in the past - just one 4'x8' raised bed. My wife and I got an indoor hydroponic garden a year or two ago, and it's just so much less dismaying to grow plants when I don't have to worry about heat and cold and water levels, much less rabbits or fungus or whatever kept slaughtering all my curcurbits in previous years. We've done peppers and cherry tomatoes hydroponically, even, but they take a ton of space and it's a hassle to pollinate anything indoors, so for this batch we're just planning on growing salad greens and herbs (basil, parsley, chives, dill, mint, thyme) in addition to starting plants to transplant outdoors.
roystgnr
1d ago
I think he could probably get $100 billion by pledging 300% collateral, which is his whole net worth.
According to the quote you posted, he's been borrowing 1% of his collateral when taking out personal loans, right? 33% is a much harder sell.
Elon has already successful borrowed tens of billions to Fund X/Twitter buyout.
That's a better example, I admit. His personal loans there were $6.25B backed by $62.5B of Tesla stock. I wouldn't say that deal turned out great overall for his lenders and partners, but despite that I wouldn't be surprised if he could pull off 10% again - if TSLA dropped 90% it would be at a solid P/E for a value stock, regardless of how strongly Musk was signaling that he might have lost faith in it's nominal value.
roystgnr
1d ago
No; in an acquisition you have someone willing to sell overbalanced by someone else heavily motivated to buy. The buyer generally initiates the transaction, so is apparently more motivated, so instead of the stock tanking it rises by an acquisition premium.
Here, you would have Musk trying to unload $100B of a stock with a P/E over 100, balanced by ... which bank do you think wants that? They could get a 1% return with less risk by buying $25B of T-bills and stuffing the other $75B in their mattresses. TSLA commands such a high P/E because many investors believe there's still massive room for growth there, but would they maintain that belief in the face of the CEO trying to divest as fast as possible? Most wouldn't. The old joke about how "if you see the bomb squad tech running, try to keep up" applies to any knowledge imbalance of that magnitude. Could be Musk really wants to lose a third of his net worth just to bump military spending by 10% for one year; could be the tech just really needs to pee. The smart money still runs.
roystgnr
1d ago
The paragraph even gives a ratio! "100 times". If he borrowed at the same ratio against every bit of stock he had, that would total to about $3B liquid, not $100B. He could free up a lot more wealth by selling stock rather than borrowing against it, but I wouldn't want to guess how much he'd tank the stock by doing so. It's not that there aren't enough potential shareholders out there to buy it, it's that everyone would be very wary of buying stock in a company whose CEO is dumping it en masse.
roystgnr
1d ago
absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
Yes, it is.
"P(M) = P(M|E)P(E) + P(M|¬E)P(¬E)" is a tautology, true for for any valid probabilities and conditional probabilities P with events E and M. Likewise for the identity "P(¬E)=1-P(E)". Combining the two gives
P(M) = P(M|E)P(E) + P(M|¬E)(1-P(E))
To say that "E is evidence for M" is to assert "P(M|E) > P(M)", and if we use that (along with "P(E)>0") we can derive the inequality
P(M) > P(M)P(E) + P(M|¬E)(1-P(E))
Subtract "P(M)P(E)" from both sides, then divide by 1-P(E) (using "P(E)<1"), and we get
P(M) > P(M|¬E)
which is to say that "absence of E is evidence against M".
The magnitude of the evidence depends greatly on the specifics, and can be negligible, but it's never zero.
roystgnr
2d ago
I did damn it with faint praise by bringing up the market segment like that, didn't I? That wasn't intentional; it's one of my favorite books, without qualifiers, and I just wanted to explain the length. It is aimed at 12 year olds, but it's better than Heinlein's other juveniles, which in turn are better on average than most books targeted at adults.
roystgnr
2d ago
Citizen of the Galaxy (1957) is pretty good, although short-ish.
It's a juvenile (what publishers now call "middle grade"), and about the right length for its target audience. It's much better than you'd expect for a book targeted at 12 year olds, though. It also fits
serious conflict, not "everyone claps and praises to moral superiority of main character, slavery instantly disappears".
perfectly.
roystgnr
7d ago
The top producers in Europe look to be Germany, Italy, France, the UK, and Ireland. Per capita their output compared to the US is about +38%, -18%, -41%, -43%, ... and +379%??!?!?!
Okay, I was looking up numbers to make a joke about how Germany is carrying the EU, but forget what I was intending to say. What the heck is going on in Ireland? They barely made the European top 5 since they've got such a low population, but they're still outproducing Spain with like a tenth of the population. They're even outdoing Switzerland, which I would have thought would be the world leader in the low-population high-value-manufacture combo. Is this just on paper somehow, some remaining accounting artifact of how they used to be incredibly popular for multinational corporate tax avoidance? I suppose their stats office does say their output is 40% "basic pharmaceuticals", plus around 20% "food products" and 10% "chemicals", but there's still ~20% composed of metal/rubber/plastic/wood/silicon stuff that we might call "stereotypical" manufacturing, and it's not like US output is all steel burnished with blood and sweat either.
roystgnr
7d ago
There's a quip about literacy, usually misattributed to Twain, that goes something like "The person who does not read has no advantage over the person who cannot read."
IMHO the same applies more strongly to numeracy. I would dare to hope that Starmer et. al., at least passed Algebra, and perhaps Calculus ... but what even was the point, if, when they have concerns that can be informed by mere arithmetic, they don't even consider using that? I'd like to offer kudos to you for offering a better analysis than I've seen so far from politicians or journalists, but I wish that were a greater compliment than it is.
roystgnr
8d ago
Verbal comprehension is, if anything, easier with the written word than with spoken words. You do lose a little subtext when you don't have body language and intonation cues, but on the other hand it's harder to backtrack to reevaluate confusing parts of a video. And either way, the hard part of comprehension isn't the part where you can translate squiggles to sounds in your head. People who can't correctly answer basic reading comprehension questions aren't going to become able to answer them because a phone reads them out loud. In cases where they realize they're misunderstanding, they might be able to straighten themselves out by asking the phone AI, but too often people don't know what they don't know.
I think where literacy greatly wins out isn't reading for comprehension, though, it's reading for speed, which makes it easy to filter what you read. I naturally read about 3x faster than a natural speaking rate, and I can speed read or at least skim about 6x faster. At those speed differences, reading is just a more profitable use of time than listening ever could be - I can investigate an interesting Motte comment in seconds and decide whether to reread it thoroughly, whereas with something like a YouTube video I have to rely on trusted channels (or in desperation, The Algorithm) to decide what's worth my time. It's only the visual part of the audio-visual media that makes the tedious audio part tolerable; a photo or diagram or so on is often much more efficient than any verbal description of it would be.
But I also know many people who prefer it the other way.
Yeah, there's the thing. Doom-scrolling TikTok sounds insane to me, but people do it, even in our mostly-literate world. And the benefits of reading more quickly require you to be able to read quickly; that can be a virtuous cycle if you got into it as a child, or it can be a vicious cycle if you never decide it's worth the bother. It's not a fast cycle, so I wouldn't make any strong predictions about ten years from now ... but a hundred years from now, will reading to your kids so they grow up into the kind of people who enjoy reading to their kids still be an ongoing tradition, not an antiquated fad? I have no idea.
roystgnr
8d ago
So then we're back to the status quo of zero sentences in N% of cases, but we get justice in 100-N%? Since N will be less than 100 that still sounds like an improvement.
roystgnr
8d ago
IMHO a better solution to the "fruit from the poisonous tree" rule would be "the criminal defendant can be in prison when the criminal cop is too". Two crimes get two sentences, not zero. Making one sentence contingent on the other would be sufficient to fix the bad incentives.
In this case, though ... do we even need to imprison the "defendant"? "A confidential informant said he was MS-13" got him held without bond after he was arrested for loitering, but never got a conviction. "The cops think this gang-member-turned-snitch is very trustworthy now" is a good place to start an investigation but surely it's not a good enough place to end one; police informants are sometimes themselves motivated more by base incentives than by a newly-acquired love of honesty and justice.
roystgnr
8d ago
I'm a consequentialist with a complex value system that isn't trivially compressed.
Wait, how is this incompatible with utilitarianism? A large chunk of the Sequences was an attempt to convince people that, despite Von Neumann-Morganstern being a theorem about rational values being expressible as a utility function, human values still aren't easily compressed into a trivial utility function. It was a key lemma in service of the proposition "if you think you have a simple function representing human utility and you're going to activate ASI with it then You're Gonna Have A Bad Time".
As an aside, this is where I most differ from Yudkowsky on the current race to AGI: he seems to think we're now extra-doomed because we don't even fully understand the AIs we're creating; I think we're now fractionally-doomed for the same reason. The contrapositive of "a utility function simple enough to understand is unsafe" is "a safe utility function is something we won't fully understand". I don't know if stochastic descent + fine-tuning for consistency will actually derive a tolerably human value system starting from human text/audio/video corpuses, but it's at least possible.
roystgnr
9d ago
But "talking" to them does not give the impression they are better at reasoning than anyone I know who has scored >50% on USMAO, IMO, or the Putnam.
They are still improving very quickly, and I don't see the rate of improvement leveling off. Gemini 2.5 recently answered with ease a test question of mine that Gemini 2.0 (and, honestly, everything prior to Claude 3.5) had been utterly confused by. But I admit that they're definitely lacking in reasoning skills still; they're much better at retrieval and basic synthesis of knowledge than they are at extrapolating it to anything too greatly removed from standard problems that I'd expect were in their training data sets.
Still, can we take a step back and look at the big picture here? The USAMO is an invitation-only math competition where they pick the top few hundred students from a bigger invitation-only competition winnowed from an open math competition, and the median score on it is still sub-50%. The Putnam has thousands of competitors, but they're typically the most dedicated undergrad math majors and yet the median score on it is often zero! How far have we moved the goal posts, to get to this point? It's the "Can a robot write a symphony?" "Can you?" movie scene made manifest.
roystgnr
9d ago
If you think that Presidential democracy was a mistake
Do you think 5 is less than?
That's not a coherent question, right? You have to have two numbers to be able to talk about whether one is less than the other. 5 is less than 6. 5 is not less than 4.
But the same applies to any question of the form "Was X a mistake?" Was Presidential democracy a mistake compared to remaining part of the British empire? Probably not - the colonists did have some legitimate grievances. Was Presidential democracy a mistake compared to a Parliamentary democracy with a Prime Minister? Maybe, but not obviously so; we can see the cracks in parliamentary democracies too, today.
Was Presidential democracy with first-past-the-post voting a mistake compared to an approval-voting system? Here I'd opine the answer is clearly "yes", but when the Constitution was ratified Condorcet had just barely started publishing on voting theory, and Arrow and Duverger were a century away from being born, so I can hardly fault the Framers for lacking the benefit of hindsight here.
They did try to leave us with a mechanism for changing the Constitution to fix their later-identified mistakes, which has been very fruitful in the case of some other mistakes, and which you'd think would be sufficient in general... but the trouble with changing a mistake in the mechanisms by which people and parties gain power is that, almost by definition, the people and parties in power have strong incentives to want that change to not be made. If you're a partisan demagogue whose route to election has been "take advantage of your polarized base, plus a few moderates who can be convinced that the opposing partisan demagogue is more awful", why would you want to make it easier for challengers within your ideology to run against you and simultaneously make it likely that you'll face less-awful opponents from other ideologies?
roystgnr
14d ago
FDR's supporters did object to Court-packing, which is why it didn't happen.
Well, there may have been other reasons too. It's hard to read minds, but even if the court's streak of "growing wheat on your own land for your own animals' consumption is interstate commerce"-level nonsense wasn't done out of fear of court packing, the resulting "feds can do whatever they want" situation still made court packing effectively unnecessary.
roystgnr
14d ago
That's a very good point. We try to make 66% or whatever the de jure floor for "overturn this rule", but if the median voter is tempted enough or unprincipled enough then 51% remains de facto sufficient for "wilfully misinterpret this rule and get away with it".
roystgnr
15d ago
That's a fascinating rabbit hole to go down: How the ‘Star Trek’ Punch Became the Worst Fight Move on TV.
In hindsight I also love the fact that, out of all the unrealistic sci-fi show things that nerds loved to geek out about, I never saw Star Trek fight choreography come up. Do the fleet sizes in Star Wars make tactical and economic sense? Oh, we can rant and debate about that for hours. Is the apparent motion of stars while the Enterprise is at warp consistent with the canon speeds the ship is at? Of course not, but here's a fan theory explaining why. Now, is clasping your fists together to punch with both at once a great fight move? What, why would you even ask a question about fisticuffs instead of something we know more about like teleporters??
roystgnr
15d ago
The best fiction accurately reflects the world in most ways, in order to explore the implications of deliberately changing the fictional world in one or a few ways. If you don't want to make any changes, just write a history or a biography, and it'll be more useful. If you want to make an unlimited set of changes, that might be aesthetically evocative but it's not going to be interesting - at some point your attempts to create a world primarily from your own mind only tell me about your mind, not about any worlds.
Looking at "Aliens, Terminator 2, Buffy, Xena, ... the various Star Treks, The Matrix, ..." (I never watched Dark Angel, nor enough Farscape to comment), most of them actually came off pretty well in this sense? In rough order from best to worst (by this criterion; I still love DS9!):
Aliens had Vasquez get pretty buff, but it doesn't save her any more than it does the buff male marines who outnumber her. Newt is a survivor because she was the best at running and hiding; Ripley is buff enough (in part due to the Alien backstory) that it's important to the story, but the importance is "she can carry that huge gun/flamethrower", not "she could overpower a man". She's capable of as much courage as the men, but she doesn't let that drive her into extreme risks until maternal "must save Newt" instinct forces it on her.
Terminator 2 relies even more heavily on backstory here. Out of context, "the woman is the super tough super buff one" seems like pure proto-Woke, but the backstory is that this is the same woman who was a fragile damsel-in-distress who barely survived the previous movie, was turned into an utterly driven person for a decade and a half by her experiences there, and hasn't had anything to do during that time except plot and scheme and exercise in a mental hospital. That "experience creating strength" character arc isn't denied to the males; Miles Dyson and John Connor don't have time to get buff, but they both gain emotional fortitude very quickly.
In The Matrix, "the girl is one of the super tough super buff ones" is a natural consequence of the deliberate changes, no weirder than the same situation for Keanu, who at this point is closer to gangly "Bill and Ted" Keanu than to "training with Taran Butler for John Wick" Keanu. Their avatars have super powers when they're in the video game simulation.
In Buffy, "the girl is the super tough super buff one" is the deliberate change, specifically justified in-story by ancient magic. There's a wide variation in physical skill among the non-magically-powered girls and women, but they generally don't fare as well.
In Xena, "the woman is the super tough super buff one" is pretty much only justified by "she's exceptional", unless there was more to the story I've forgotten? But IIRC "exceptional women are physically competitive with exceptional men" was just played straight here.
In the 90s Star Treks, there wasn't a ton of physical combat, but when there was they generally played the gender differences straight too. Perhaps the most common example was Major Kira fighting, and while I can definitely believe that a trained and experienced guerrilla can disarm a random idiot with a hand weapon in close quarters, by the time they get to "mostly holding her own while surrounded by three Klingon warriors" it's clear that plot armor knows no gender.
roystgnr
15d ago
I've made no secret in this forum of my attachment to truth as a terminal value, but experience has dispelled in me the conviction that this is a preoccupation of most people
Yesterday's news was, "NASA reveals astronauts’ return 'would not have happened' without Trump’s intervention"
By "NASA" here, we mean "Press Secretary Bethany Stevens, appointed a couple weeks ago", so hopefully I'm not indicting our top space-administration minds when I point out that this is a obvious bold-faced lie. The decision to bring back the Starliner astronauts in the Crew-9 capsule, as finally happened a week or so ago, was made last August, months before Trump was elected, much less took office. The Crew-9 launch was performed with two empty seats, reserved for their return as part of this plan, last September.
How can someone appointed to the job of "understand and explain what NASA is doing" be such an utter, unbelievable failure at understanding and explaining what NASA is doing? Well, that's probably why she was appointed.
or indeed something they ought to preoccupy themselves with in the first place.
Exactly! Imagine if, in Stevens' previous job as Ted Cruz's press secretary, she had been very assiduous about explaining that the Crew-9 return had been all planned out during Biden's term, and that the only change in plans during Trump's second term was that SpaceX took a little longer than planned to get the Crew-10 capsule ready and so the rotation was delayed a bit. Does she get praised for her commitment to truth and accuracy, and get her promotion more promptly? Or does NASA instead end up with a different press secretary who isn't such a killjoy?
The interesting thing about Brodski's story, that makes it not another case of "believing lies can be strategically useful", is that he is one of those few people who specifically and deliberately tries to avoid that, and yet one of the "useful" lies still bit him. When people like Stevens or the Boston Globe tell obvious falsehoods, it's good to wonder which of them fell for a dumb idea vs which of them are just being strategically deceptive, but Brodski would have to be playing the long game indeed to post a deep dive into how dumb he was. In his case, I'd like to hope that @pigeonburger had the right idea, that "if it had been a big issue for him I would assume he would have ended up on the correct opinion faster". Indeed the easiest way to fail to answer a question is to fail to truly ask the question, so you'd think Occam's Razor says we're done here. But maybe now I'm the one not paying attention to evidence? E.g. questions of politics and religion have no shortage of dedicated investigators, and yet many major questions don't see those investigators converge toward a single answer, or into a set of different-but-compatible-answers, or even to a state of humble explicit uncertainty.
Perhaps the key phrase there is "politics and religion"? Our ancestors may have all been through too many generations wherein anyone who announced "My epistemic credence is 90% on your side but still 10% on the other" had a good chance of ending up with their bodies 90% on one side of a blade and 10% on the other. The strategically deceptive thing to do in such cases is to keep your solid Bayesian reasoning private and just express false certainty publicly, but humans aren't as good at tricking each other unless we first trick ourselves, and either way why bother hanging on to good reasoning habits you can hardly ever use? Just be part of the tribe. You might get a promotion out of it, and if you were smart enough to ditch those good reasoning habits beforehand then you don't even have to feel ashamed afterwards.
Would you count the West Africa Squadron as another example? Admittedly, "Okay, we're not going to stop you from owning or selling slaves, but we'll try to stop you from taking them across the ocean" was kind of a baby step in the grand project of abolition, and in some ways an anti-globalist rather than pro-globalist step, but it was a rule based on principle that was enforced with British Empire funds and lives, against a trade that had been profitable to British slavers. They did it for a decade before the US started helping, then for two more decades before the US joined in in earnest.
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