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And what is falling in love with an actor? Not jerking off?

It's certainly a lot less messy!

My point is that falling in love with an actor is (usually) falling in love with an idea or image, not an actual person, and in that way it's not that much different than jacking off.

By definition it's a bit of a lagging indicator, unless we assume that all these folks have better access to inside information than the rest of us. Given that I was well aware of, for example, the likelihood of a Covid pandemic well before a bunch of rich people flew to New Zealand, it seems likely that CNN is gonna be a better gauge.

I think the point is exactly that some people do have better information for wars.

In COVID's case nobody knew how governments all over the world would react and how bad the situation would get (and rich people weren't particularly affected anyway) but for wars we do have regular insider trading happening because it's easy to know more or less exactly "there is going to be an attack".



Just because they flew to New Zeland at time D, it doesn't mean they were not aware of the situation in time D - x.

Correct. But this indicator is "when do the vast majority of wealthy people actually take to the air?" Which means it's 'belief' lagged by however long it takes them to get in the air. And the fact is, most wealthy people dont actually have particularly good inside information. Even if a small percent do, this indicator won't see it.

We will all know from the news that something really bad is about to happen before this indicator goes high. Polymarket is a way better indicator.


You're assuming normal events, that usually follow some deterministic logic. May I remind you that we have Donald Trump on the white house at the present moment.

One of the new dynamics is a loop between a "code review" LLM and a "fix LLM". It's super annoying because the code review LLM often finds more bugs on a follow-up review that were there from the beginning, but at least I can loop both until check go green.

I think this is a false dichotomy. My wife and I worked through our 20s, but regularly took vacations. We flew to NYC from LA at least 2x per year from 25-30. We had season ski passes. We lived frugally but well.

I was in grad school, she was a consultant. Our income was solidly lower middle class for LA, and we still managed to save 25-40% of our income per year.

Now that I've got a kid and am in my 40s, I've taken a year off, and I don't think I'd be bored in "early retirement". I'd probably spend time with my daughter, do more camping, and work on intellectual side projects (I have more than I can count).

The trick has been: I don't try to keep up with other people, I follow my own passions. I know how to cook, and to make my own fun. I'm curious and I like find out answers on my own. I never took on credit card debt.

I'm lucky because I had support from my parents through early college. I got student loans and supported myself after sophomore year or so. (I'm strategically still paying the minimum on those loans fwiw.) otherwise I stayed out of debt until I got a mortgage in my late 30s.

So, it is possible to do both. But I have noticed that I have a better ability to control my desire for acquisition than most people, and a decent amount of frugality in most areas of my life.


Finally!

I've struggled with this... not personally, but watching other people going crazy with whatever money they get and then complaining about not resting enough, not traveling enough, not having fun enough.

They go ahead and ONLY take full 2 weeks vacations, never even trying spreading some of those days here and there, perhaps right next to a holiday to make it a long one, and then complain later that they are burned out...

Most people even with means complain about some of us doing this normally (we don't have to travel the world every weekend, come on), and you talk with them, and if they just stopped "wanting to live outside their means", they could actually accomplish it, even if little by little.

I commend you for living such a life, because even if none of our lives are perfect, some of us enjoy it as best we can. :)


OK if you were in grad school, ski passes, multiple flights to NYC per year, living in LA and saving 20-40% of your income, your wife must have been making a hell of a lot as a consultant.

How much do you think all this cost?

Ski passes for 2: $500 at mammoth. (Yes, the prices have definitely increased.) We'd sometimes drive up just for the day (leave 4am, back 9pm) to save on lodging. This was fairly doable in my 20s.

Flights to NYC: we'd book on cheap off-days, and I think round trip was usually about $400 for both of us. LA<->NYC is a very competitive route and deals can be amazing. I learned to use Priceline like a pro, so we typically stayed in manhattan for about $100/night or less(!) for fancy hotels that usually charge $300+. We often would stay in 2-3 different hotels to save on money.

So all-in for these activities was probably about $6k-7k per year. Grad stipends were $25k, which covered rent plus most of the vacation, and my wife had an entry-level job at a decent firm.

Didn't feel like a stretch in part because we were really flexible, but we were careful about how we spent our money.

No cable TV, for example. That shit steals your time and money (doubly so because the ads encourage you to spend more money).


It's rarely understood that infinity isn't something mathematicians made up to make things more complex, it's an abstraction that makes a lot of ideas vastly simpler.

This is alluded to in the article; it's challenging to prove a+b=b+a without infinity (though if you do modular/wraparound arithmetic it becomes straightforward).

It seems to me (not an expert in this area by a long stretch) that ultrafinite mathematics could basically be a branch of theoretical computer science in the sense that people seem interested in procedures to generate the numbers. In this regard, it's a bit surprising that TCS wasn't mentioned in the article.


Correct. It depends. For example, it might depend on what the collaboration is likely to result in. Perhaps it would be more likely to be moral there were some boundaries in place, like "no mass domestic surveillance" or "no fully autonomous weapons".

Because the US government currently believes it is legal to blow up civilian drug traffickers and wage war without congressional approval. So at some point, yes, collaboration is immoral.


The US military has deployed fully autonomous weapons since at least 1979, and potential adversaries are now doing the same. For better or worse that ship has sailed.

Look, a dumb bomb is a fully autonomous weapon once it's launched. Let's be real: an LLM making decisions on who to target and when and where to launch munitions represents a meaningful change in our concept of autonomous weapons.

So we are wrong to express any opposition or desire to maybe raise the bar here? Aren’t we supposed to be “the good guys”? Or should we just accept a role as the menace of the world, wildly throwing its weight around whenever we have an unscrupulous president?

Those questions are moot. There are situations where it's simply impossible to have a human in the loop because reaction time is too slow or the environment is too dangerous or communication links are unreliable. Russia is deploying fully autonomous weapons to attack Ukraine today and they will be selling those weapons (or licensing the technology) to their allies. There is no option to stop. And let's please not have any nonsense suggestions that we can somehow convince Russia / China / Iran / North Korea to sign a binding, enforceable treaty banning such weapons: that's never going to happen.

There's always an option to stop. We can choose civility over barbarity, stop trying to kill people over 1000+ year old dick waving contests, and stop threatening each other with doomsday weapons because your grandpa shot my grandpa. Just because our leaders are too stupid and cowardly doesn't mean there's no option.

Sounds good! Please convince Vladimir Putin to choose civility over barbarity, then get back to us so we can discuss options.

Not sure you're aware, but the joke may be on you. It's apparently Putin who's convinced Trump and the Mullahs (not the band) to choose civility over babarity by allowing a superyacht of one of his cronies to pass through the Hormuz.[0]

Russian trolling at its finest, truly. This timeline keeps raising the bar on the absurdity quotient.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2pn8zdxdjo


I wasn't aware that the US was throwing away its moral compass for the just cause of frustrating Putin's expansionism. The new story seems to be Putin gets to do what he wants, and so do we.

If you think there's something wrong with giving our warfighters the most effective weapons to carry out their assigned missions with minimum casualties then your moral compass is completely broken. Personally I favor a less interventionist foreign policy but that has to be addressed through the political process. Not by unaccountable individual defense contractor employees making arbitrary policy decisions.

> warfighters

You should know that every single veteran I know ruthlessly mocks Hegseth for trying to use this term non-comedically. It’s a synonym for someone who takes their service way too seriously/makes it their whole identity. It’s almost exclusively used to mock people.


We aren’t Russian and Putin is not our leader. We can choose how we behave and operate. This is like saying we should use chemical weapons if someone else deploys one. You’re speaking as if it’s all so binary. “Do what they do or you lose.”

It's cheap and easy for someone sitting safely behind a computer to pretend to be morally superior when you're not the one who has to make hard decisions, or deal with the consequences. Chemical weapons have seen minimal use after WWI largely because they're not very militarily effective. Autonomous kinetic weapons actually work. Right now Ukrainians are building autonomous weapons to defend themselves against Russian autonomous weapons. For Ukrainians it is binary: do what they do or you lose. Would you prefer that they lose? And don't presume to tell us that the Russians can be persuaded to stop by non-violent means, that would be completely delusional.

>It's cheap and easy for someone sitting safely behind a computer to pretend to be morally superior when you're not the one who has to make hard decisions, or deal with the consequences.

This is a deeply flawed argument that has an obvious application back at you, but either way if you’re going to stoop to personal attacks I think we’re done here.


Here's the trick: the CEO doesn't know either, but they make decisions anyway. Knowing that they don't know is a good skill for a CEO to have, it freezing when they don't know is not.

the skill is twisting the optics, and in some cases, the reality, to match those decisions.

Not if you don't have the data. This is one of the reasons that google changed how it tracked people's data.

The site also has been dated to ~790,000 years old. Also was hard to find in a quick skim. So, direct evidence of the types of firewood humans have been using for the better part of a million years. Neat.

This actually _is_ falsifiable; I've written before that you can determine whether the point-spread function of the transients match the PSF of stars. If not, then it does not come from outer space, it's an issue with the film, i.e., radiation.

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