I think they’re on to something, but the solution needs more work. Sometimes it’s not just individual engineers who are playing defence, it’s whole departments or whole companies that are set up around “don’t change anything, you might break it”. Then the company creates special “labs” teams to innovate.
To borrow a football term, sometimes company structure seems like it’s playing the “long ball” game. Everyone sitting back in defence, then the occasional hail mary long pass up to the opposite end. I would love to see a more well developed understanding within companies that certain teams, and the processes that they have are defensive, others are attacking, and others are “mid field”, i.e. they’re responsible for developing the foundations on which an attacking team can operate (e.g. longer term refactors, API design, filling in gaps in features that were built to a deadline). To win a game you need a good proportion of defence, mid field and attack, and a good interface between those three groups.
I suppose that really depends on what the subject of the simulation is. If it’s you personally, it only needs to simulate other scientists telling you about quarks, the solar system and the latest JWST images. If it’s humanity in general then other civilisations are not required. Of course it might be that this is a giant quark simulation and things like gravity, planets, life and humanity are an interesting quirk that’s arisen recently.
Soon everyone exists in a social bubble thats 1000 times worse than any present day social media bubble. It becomes impossible to interact with another actual human because there’s no common frame of reference. Micro languages emerge. AIs seamlessly translate everything into your micro language.
Any IRL interaction between two humans becomes almost impossible. It’s like travelling from the US to Japan today (assuming you don’t speak Japanese), you’re reduced to pointing and google translate.
Because you just never interact with other real people, and real people often seem like pale shadows of the hyper real AIs we talk to, the concept of fellow human beings having a “soul” or deserving rights or dignity is eroded. Policy (and life in general) becomes more ruthlessly utilitarian. Eg climate change has screwed the people in Yemen. Meh. I probably don’t even hear about it. If I do I don’t register those people as important humans because most of the “people” I intact with every day are artificial. I regularly delete the ones I don’t like and generate more. The idea that I should care about how they _feel_ is a strange and alien concept to me.
As an English/French speaker who is learning Japanese I'd love to see the chat logs!
I first learned French to fluency and then I moved on to Japanese and I realized that it's so much harder to learn Japanese (and presumably other languages that use the Chinese alphabet). The issue is that when you go from English to French, for a large part you can simply translate the words. From English to Japanese I have to first translate, re-arrange the grammar and then account for idioms at the very least.
What exactly were the hunters from Hunter-Gatherer's hunting if it was not meat?
Isn't the poor health with the switch explained by the lack of food diversity?
Also, wouldn't there be less meat availability after the switch from hunter-gatherer as your population grows and your crop/planting efforts grow but animal husbandry did not scale at the same pace.
Hundreds of millions of people in India and around the world are just fine without meat, it’s not like we have to eat it. Could even be better for us not to.
Even if hundreds of millions of people in India do not eat meat, ghee and milk – both animal products – are a key part of the Indian diet. Moreover, quite a lot of those Indians eschewing meat will still eat eggs, such that restaurants have to use the term "pure vegetarian" to disambiguate.
There is an extremely high correlation between eating meat and poorer health outcomes. You can find studies where meat is better or being vegan or vegetarian looks worse, but on balance, it appears that limiting meat intake (little to none) points to better health outcomes.
Nutrition is complicated. It could be that impulsive eaters or people who make poor eating decisions rarely exclude meat from their diet, and the issue isn’t the meat so much as the rest of their diet or the sheer volume of what they eat.
In any case, there isn’t any compelling data to eat meat other than “it tastes good”. Unless you live on subsistence farming and a goat eating grass you can’t eat is an essential source of food for you.
Might be simplifying things too much in general, but for the layperson it's not horrible advice - just a bit of everything, without going into excess. Some grains, veggies, fruits and berries, probably some dairy products, eggs/fish/meat occasionally too, at least for the folks for whom a vegetarian/vegan lifestyle would be be difficult.
Personally, I have both lactose free milk and plant based alternatives sometimes (there's a rice drink that I like, but oat/almond varieties are okay), some cheese (also the cottage variety) and meat sometimes, though mostly chicken instead of something like beef. In equal measure if not more, I also choose plant based alternatives too, like bean/pea/spinach burger patties, or just dishes without meat sometimes. A bit of fat, a bit of sugar, albeit limiting sugary drinks and processed foods somewhat.
Bloodwork seems fine so far, also losing a little bit of weight gradually to improve BMI, maybe should slightly lower cholesterol because it's towards the upper end of a healthy reference interval. Although I will say that sometimes there's definitely a pronounced sense of hunger, even though I've had enough food, which is annoying.
Pretty sure that when we're discussing the othering of certain humans by classifying them as "subspecies", India is not a good topic to bring to the table.
I'd argue that the increase occurred earlier. Everything we're learning about other human species is showing they also had intelligence and were around before Erectus came to be.
Some time ago I asked myself: why did gambling become so addictive? You always loose, but it’s so powerfully addictive the behaviour must be beneficial in some way. It occurred to me that you always loose when doing “artificial gambling” (casinos, horse races etc) but “natural gambling” is different. Should we explore this coastline, should we try and cultivate this plant, should we run this scientific experiment? These bets may not pay off individually, but for the overall population over time they always pay off. The natural world has ergodicity.
One of the first things that some reading on psychology gives you is the realisation that the “real self” is an illusion. You’re a bundle of competing drives and narratives. Even you don’t know why you do stuff most of the time, and you make up justifications after the fact. So if one way of looking at things makes you stay home and cry, while another leads to going out and making the world a better place, maybe training yourself to pick the latter interpretation is a good thing.
Interestingly, Internal Family Systems therapy, which applies techniques from family systems therapy to the internal world, treats this as a "both-and." You do have a core Self, but one of the primary things it does is lead and direct and serve as the primary attachment figure for all the other parts of you, which are conceptualized as individual, separate characters with their own history, needs, desires, wounds, and fears.
I've found this to be an immensely helpful way to work through my own struggles and maladaptive behaviors. Trying to get myself to do something challenging is more like leading a group, some of whom are gung ho and others who are terrified because something about it reminds them of something that went very badly for them back when we were younger.
When it feels like some negative attitude is overriding the whole system, it's said that a part has "blended" with the Self, and the way forward is to help it unblend, to step back or aside so you, as the Self, can be in relationship with it, can listen to it and understand it (which goes a long way in its own right), but then also help meet the need or protect from the scary thing. The part never has access to all the resources you do as the Self, and the part is often a young child trying to take on something that should be overwhelming for a child.
I have no idea whatsoever if this is the case, but it wouldn't surprise me to find that what's actually happening inside the brain in these cases is an energy shift away from, for example, this over-excited anxious part of the brain to one with more control and executive function. It might be a way of training the mind to direct the activation of the brain, not unlike training for any other sort of skill.
If he stopped the legislature doing something, there would be a “constitutional crisis” but whether or not he then lost the power to do that again would really depend on public opinion and how well judged his move was. I can imagine a scenario in which a corrupt and unpopular government is holding onto power by twisting the rules somehow, and the king says no. It would be chaos, but if the king had public opinion on his side it could work out well.
For me this is a strength of a constitutional monarchy over an appointed or elected but mostly ceremonial head of state. The people have a relationship with the king, they’ve grown up together and there’s a connection there that’s hard to define. In times of crisis that connection could play a key role.
> The people have a relationship with the king, they’ve grown up together and there’s a connection there that’s hard to define. In times of crisis that connection could play a key role.
That relationship really is hard to define... As a Brit my defining memory of the now King was - as an 8 year old - learning of his desire to be a tampon in his then mistress and current Queen.
This actaully happened last year. The then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, was in a spot of political bother and it looked like the then Queen was going to sack him, as she must (according to the conventions that comprise the UK's constitution) dismiss any prime minister who cannot command the confidence of the House of Commons.
Johnson didn't want to go, so he announced (via a leak to a tame newspaper, another part of our unwritten constitution) that he would advise the Queen to dissolve parliament, in order that new elections be held. He hoped to bring rebellious Tory MPs in line by threatening those in marginal seats with defeat, and those in secure seats with the prospect of a lengthy spell in opposition.
The Palace put paid to this plan by informing the PM that the Queen would be unavailable to meet with him, in the event of him perhaps wanting to to her in order to dissolve parliament.
Convert “$x” into “something Alice wants”. Alice doesn’t really want $x, she wants a new car, a house, a vacation, a new machine for her factory.
Now “They want to (add, prevent from decay) as many edges as possible” becomes “They want to encourage different parties to lend each other things they want”.
hold up hold up. there's a key distinction between the two categories of things you list in your examples. The first three are items that are consumed to meet Alice's specific desires, with features that match these desires-- a specific car, a specific house, a specific vacation. Alice buys them because she wants to use them.
In a sense Alice also buys physical capital to use them, but she's not using physical capital because of its specific qualities but instead because of the money the products it produces will fetch when sold on the market. Alice wants a vacation because she wants to go to Paris or New Zealand or whatever. Alice wants a machine part because she wants the money it will make her. Two very different categories of thing!
I bring this up not exactly as a critique of your analysis, but instead because none of the discussion in this thread is particularly tethered to the process of production, and it's specifically the disruption to production that makes the SVB collapse troubling.
I really hope this isn’t a serious comment. No matter what your payroll budget is, the opportunity cost will still exist. You will still have to choose which roles to spend it on (and which to not).
If you go a read a FAANG annual report, you’ll find the headcounts are in fact finite, meaning they do in fact devote a finite budget to those resources. Just because the headcount or the budget seems so large that you can’t easily conceptualize it, doesn’t mean they are unlimited. Regardless of their motives for increasing headcounts, doing so has an opportunity cost, and so does the way in which they choose to do it.
What is the opportunity cost then? What are they trading off by hiring more people?
The fact there is finite budget and headcount doesn't necessarily mean anything. If you're limited by the number of quality employees you can recruit and onboard, budget and headcount are effectively meaningless because they're not limited by money.
How many useless projects does Google already waste money on? Google has already shown a complete ineptitude at coming out with new profit generating products. Throwing more people at problem with a broken culture won’t do any good.
That is an argument that they've reached a point where the cost of increasing engineering headcount is as high or higher than the return, not that you don't want to keep increasing headcount until you get there.
To borrow a football term, sometimes company structure seems like it’s playing the “long ball” game. Everyone sitting back in defence, then the occasional hail mary long pass up to the opposite end. I would love to see a more well developed understanding within companies that certain teams, and the processes that they have are defensive, others are attacking, and others are “mid field”, i.e. they’re responsible for developing the foundations on which an attacking team can operate (e.g. longer term refactors, API design, filling in gaps in features that were built to a deadline). To win a game you need a good proportion of defence, mid field and attack, and a good interface between those three groups.