It might be more related to snapping a Nazi salute at a Presidential inauguration and constantly promoting “race science” on X. That kind of thing.
If he had just shut up and built rockets and cars he’d be a hero like he was before he either got fash pilled or revealed himself. Not sure which it is but it doesn’t matter at this point.
I’ve never seen anyone burn that much goodwill.
The biggest thing I hate about it is the damage he’s done to the idea of a human future in space. It’s an important idea that needs better advocates.
Get rid of the cheap hands and the machines win fast…
I’ve really become fascinated by the hypothesis that outlawing slavery supercharged industrialization, and that the global crusade against slavery is why we had this whole technology explosion.
Rome knew about steam power. There’s some tantalizing evidence some ancient cultures played with electricity and maybe even simple forms of electric lights. There’s Greek stories about automatons. But why try to build machines to do real work? Just have a slave do it.
If we’d abolished slavery in ancient Roman times maybe we’d be looking at photos of habitable exoplanets from probes arriving in the Tau Ceti system by now.
> I’ve really become fascinated by the hypothesis that outlawing slavery supercharged industrialization, and that the global crusade against slavery is why we had this whole technology explosion.
Tocqueville wrote a bit about this in Democracy in America. Despite the South having an edge in terms of "free" labor the institution of slavery greatly suffocated human potential to such an extent that the non-Southern states still had higher productivity.
Should have also said controversial. I was thinking of the Baghdad battery and stories of ancient insular priesthoods and mystery cults and their “magic.” But I did remember that. It’s a lotus but Egyptians also stylized everything.
The non-woowoo proposals I’ve read call for very primitive apparati that would have been possible with metallurgy of the time. If some, I dunno, bored priests and scribes over thousands of years figured out some neat tricks. It’s before the big medieval alchemy craze but thousands of years is a long time.
I also forgot about early optics, the Antikythera mechanism which could not have been a one off, early use of fossil fuel, etc.
I don’t think the thesis I referenced argues that abolition is the only thing that made tech take off, just that it supplied an economic forcing function missing for most of the rest of history.
That would require allowing real estate prices to fall, which neither party can ever do. Real estate price appreciation is now a sacred entitlement alongside social security and medicaid and anyone threatening that loses the next election.
Unfortunately that also means housing can't become affordable because housing can't simultaneously be affordable and a good investment.
I'm not just being cynical. It's genuinely a hard problem, since crashing real estate would open the door to the next generation while bankrupting all previous generations and causing a banking crisis.
We are very much painted into a corner here, and the US doesn't even have it the worst compared to other developed nations.
They might not need to fall. With inflation being what it is, mere flatness in nominal terms could help.
Also, crafty government policy can make housing more affordable for some buyers while letting prices seem to rise. I’m not crafty enough to know how this would work, but it works in other markets. For instance, apartments that have high and increasing rent but with months of “free rent” and “discounts” thrown in that reflect a different reality, or new cars with “cash back,” or tuition at expensive selective private universities that is almost completely fanciful.
Real Estate can go sideways for a decade or two while the rest of the economy grows around it. Given that bonds move in 40 year cycles and rates bottomed 5 years ago, it might already be happening.
It's still not a conspiracy. Those are all local responses to incentives. The incentive structure, the system, is what determines the outcome, not the players.
In a basketball game who wins may vary but you know balls will go through hoops because that's what the rule set of the game incentivizes.
Investors want returns so number must go up. Eventually companies and their executives exhaust the basic honest core business so they have to start scraping for more revenue growth. Eventually this leads to the familiar process of enshittification where the company flips the script and sells the customers as the product and nickel and dimes people. This eventually ruins the product but number must still go up, so who else can pay? Criminals, scammers, government propagandists, political influence operations, intelligence agencies, militaries, etc.
We get what I just described for the same reason basketball makes balls go through hoops.
Why does number have to go up? Because you want to retire. Your pension funds and banks and such hire financial experts to invest. Those experts invest in things that make number go up because that's their job.
That's why this is hard. You are a player. We are all both hurt by the system and benefit by the system. It feeds us and protects us and enslaves us. Everything is paradoxes and feedback loops. When you get a job you want things like benefits and union wages, but when you go shopping you pick the cheapest product which means you want to break unions.
Conspiracism is a cop out from trying to understand this. It's easier to just pick a single scapegoat (often a make believe one) and blame them.
I'm not saying all the people in all the links you posted are great people, just that they're not the architect of this. There is no architect. The game was designed by the mad blind idiot gods of complexity and evolution.
I've had the thesis for a long time that humans are not actually intelligent. We are merely clever. A clever organism can deploy local intelligence to maximize its outcome in a game. A truly intelligent organism would understand the game and become the architect. We might not have the cognitive capacity for this. Maybe ASI can, or can help us.
Maybe that's why the aliens aren't talking to us. Anyone capable of star travel is the latter. They take a look and think "interesting fauna down there but nothing intelligent yet. They only try to win games."
> It's still not a conspiracy. Those are all local responses to incentives. The incentive structure, the system, is what determines the outcome, not the players.
But that incentive structure is exactly what has been centralized these days (through monopoly platforms, whether it's apps or video or music). Arguably, the conspiracy is the design of the algorithms on these platforms.
The algorithms were designed that way to make number go up, and number must go up because the investors want it to, and the investors include the people who hold your savings account and your 401k.
It’s a big network of feedback loops. You get what the incentive structure incentivizes.
The original wasn't what shipped. From what I read the cheaper easier process wasn't, which isn't unusual.
It's also an ugly-ass car. If it had turned out to be super-reliable and cheap and "hackable" that would make up for it, even earn its strange look a cult following, but no it just ended up as an overpriced weird ugly-ass car.
Why would Tesla make "cheap" ? That's not their customer base.
Cheap hackable electric work truck (I imagine chassis with basic cabin that you can expand in various ways, like the EU van options have like half a dozen chassis) would be great but it's not something Tesla ever wants to make
>Why would Tesla make "cheap" ? That's not their customer base.
95% of their cars sold have been in the $30k to $60k range. They have long been the best bang for the buck electric car (in the US, since BYD isn’t allowed.
Who are their customer base? Musk seems to have decided to fire his actual customer base, but getting a new one more ideologically aligned with him hasn't quite worked out.
I know its not fashionable to have such pesky concerns as priority in US, but pedestrian safety was simply non-present, hence it was banned all over Europe. Not missing it here, not missing that fugly ego whim of a sick man at all.
I think it shows that much of coding is a lot easier than we think. Even very challenging programming problems involve a lot of just boilerplate and rote implementation of learned patterns.
Arcane is not the same as actually intellectually hard. Programming is arcane.
Same with circuit layout, which is also amenable to things like genetic algorithms, and yes I believe math proofs might be easier than we thought.
It seems to be that you can mix some intelligence and a learned bag of motifs with iterative gradient descent and solve math proofs like a hard jagged optimization problem. I feel like this is what has been demonstrated. You get a huge blob of Lean but it works.
We might learn there are domains like, say, nursing or writing (good writing) or blue collar work or being a secretary for a large company that require a lot more fluid intelligence than fields that have historically been smug about their high IQ requirements.
Coding itself is really quite easy, for an individual that can properly apply logic. However, it's like learning a language (Because you quite literally are.) in that much of learning to code is remembering what words do what.
The main reason it's considered so hard is that, as I've learned over the years, a large majority of the general population struggles when it comes to formal logic. It's the same reason math is considered challenging.
And then I try explaining to people that writing software and using AI and that combination of using AI to write software are all communications problems. There is an entire formal school called effective communications that zeros in on the communications aspects of, well, doing anything which include by yourself as well as collaboration teams as well as AI in any of these and that is a communications situation, and by focusing on the quality of those communications a majority of the stress and confusion evaporates. Then they argue because they argue at anything, and that ends any forward progress.
I think a good harness hides a ton of the abstraction work that makes solving these problems easier.
I work in construction in drafting for electrical and the models go off the rails all the time. Just adding grounds “to be safe” (and it sometimes makes it less safe by doing so)
Well, yes, but it is even more mechanical than this.
Here is the simplified version:
Let's say I have a company worth 1 billion dollars, publicly traded, 10 million stocks worth $100 each. I get promised $100M from the state (aka taxpayers), shareholders estimate there is about 50% chance I will actually get the money: $100M * 50% / 10M = $5. It means the stocks are now worth $5 more, so $105.
Now the government has changed, and gone are my chances to get that money, so the sock is back to $100.
The spec only defines a single error state - ENOSYS, that is basically only for systems that don't implement crypt at all.
Error handling is underspecified. The spec doesn't give you enough well-defined behaviour, meaning everyone lists pages of error-handling extensions they have added.
Pedantic, but more "author's understanding of the spec" which isn't always correct.
> assume nonstandard behavior
I go back and forth on this one (spec vs standard behavior). It feels like at some point the most widely used impl -is- the spec, as we've seen in other places (web standards).
> Upon successful completion, crypt() shall return a pointer to the hashed password [...]. Otherwise, it shall return a null pointer and set errno to indicate the error.
To the best of my knowledge, only OpenBSD and Fedora have a crypt(3) that returns NULL. Everybody else returns a string starting with "*" on error.
For example on Debian the manpage says:
> Upon error, crypt_r, crypt_rn, and crypt_ra write an _invalid_ hash to the output field of their _data_ argument, and crypt writes an invalid hash to its static storage area. This string will be shorter than 13 characters, will begin with a ‘*’, and will not compare equal to _setting_.
It might be more related to snapping a Nazi salute at a Presidential inauguration and constantly promoting “race science” on X. That kind of thing.
If he had just shut up and built rockets and cars he’d be a hero like he was before he either got fash pilled or revealed himself. Not sure which it is but it doesn’t matter at this point.
I’ve never seen anyone burn that much goodwill.
The biggest thing I hate about it is the damage he’s done to the idea of a human future in space. It’s an important idea that needs better advocates.
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