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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • The thing is business is more booming than it’s ever been, but making the line go up forever is a fool’s errand, at some point you’ll hit a peak. Hitting that peak is immensely punished in our economic system.

    If you make a hammer that’ll last 100 years, you’ll sell as many as you can reach customers who need one, before hammer sales plummet. Instead of being rewarded for making a great product, you’ll be punished when sales fall because you’ve solved a problem for most people.

    Advertising is kind of neutral in abstract in my head. Make a great product for a fair price, and let people know about it, and that’s actually probably a benefit to both parties. Make a terrible product, and tell a bunch of people it’s great, and you’ve spent resources doing them a disservice. But if you can convince them it’s good enough to spend money on it, and keep your revenue per customer above the cost to acquire them, it’s profitable. And that’s all they care about. It’s basically the same pattern as a scam, but profit is the only thing they’re told they’re allowed to care about.




  • The terrifying thing about this kind of problem is that they do have morals, but they’ve been warped. They’re surrounded by systems that tell them that what they do is good, necessary, or at least morally justified. That warp their judgement and morals, protecting and encouraging their part in heinous acts. All the while their moral judgements see themselves as the good guys, and that’s the worst part.

    If somebody sees a conflict between their personal morals, and the actions of themselves the system around them, good on them for refusing to participate anymore.




  • In the 90s, a lot of programmers spent a lot of time carefully optimizing everything, on the theory that every CPU cycle counted. And in the decades since, it’s gotten easier than ever to write software, but the craft of writing great software has stalled compared to the ease of writing mediocre software. “Why shouldn’t we block on a call to a remote service? Computers are so fast these days”



  • Some games also use the rarity system to funnel mechanically simpler cards into more common rarities, which works well in a draft environment, since those are often the cards you want to have come up more. Which is really the point of the system, ideally it would be a system to support draft environments that work well, without artificial scarcity that hurts constructed players.

    But you can also make a constructed format that only allows “simpler” cards that have been printed at common, which is neat. Or one that only allows higher rarities.




  • If you’re going to say anything other than unconditionally legal, you need some really clear legal definitions on something, but you certainly can. Like you could define viability as if you delivered it on the spot, you’d have a fully-formed baby with lungs that are ready to breathe, and otherwise unlikely to need life support. You could define the first 6 months of pregnancy as inviable.

    You could define the burden of proof in a way that protects doctors, maybe someone trying to already wrongdoing needs to prove that no reasonable physician would agree with their judgement. You could even limit who has standing to take legal action, because some random person on the street isn’t party to it at all.

    I’m not saying that “if the doctor and pregnant person agree, it’s legal” is bad, but there are certainly other reasonable options, that I think would play out similarly in practice. Like I’m assuming a doctor about to deliver a baby wouldn’t likely entertain a request for an abortion instead, nor would they likely get one.




  • Agreeing with this, expanding a RAID array is not necessarily impossible, with something like RAID 5, and the right RAID setup, you could theoretically add an identical disk without wiping it all in the rebuild. RAID 1, you’ll 100% need to copy the data somewhere that isn’t the 2/4 disks in the meantime. In an environment where storage is expensive, RAID 1 is not suitable imo.

    ZFS makes it so easy though. Throw a mismatched disk in? No big deal, it’s in your pool now. Want double parity for extra peace of mind? You can do that. It self-heals so you don’t need fsck, its maximum limits are too big to realistically matter on human scales, and the documentation on it is pretty good.



  • Certainly, some interesting developments have happened, and we’ve realized our old models/thinking about progress towards AGI needed improvement… and that’s real. I think there’s a serious conversation to be had about what AGI would be, and how we can know we’re approaching it, and when it has arrived.

    But anybody telling you it is close either has something to sell you, or has themselves bought it.


  • Yeah this is it, the problem is that even once you solve the technology problem, it becomes the choice between two logistics problems, distributing liquid fuel for refilling, and moving large amounts of power on the grid on demand. The latter is a solvable problem, but the former is just so well understood.

    Certainly, most people are better served by EVs today, for their personal vehicle needs. But I think hydrogen will be a compelling option for people with specific needs beyond the short term. Especially with continued investment in that technology in Japan.


  • There are two hydrogen fill stations between my home and work, they definitely get used, and the price per kg of green hydrogen is still trending downwards. It’ll never be the next big thing, hydrogen is heavy and has several of the other problems of gasoline that EVs always solve. But for people who need personal transport, and need to frequently go larger distances than one battery charge will support, hydrogen fuel cells solve a problem EVs have, without going back to fossil fuels; fuelling up takes negligible time.

    I think hydrogen cars will have a niche for a long time to come, enough to keep the technology around and evolving.