biggest cope on this site is thinking that the aesthetics of technological modernity are bad lol. most people like it & it’s clearly beating your alternate
@SVVAYED there’s a reason why I hang out with the latter who disagree with me all day on twitter — the trade offs are real and jarring and under appreciated
@Willyintheworld yeah the Uber strategy, tru. but tech company has no incentive to do that until it gets close to the indifference line. and bullying jurisdictions like that is not the kind of game technologists are good at
@alexisgallagher@alth0u what I mean by this is
you can pick a nice profitable vertical that’s guaranteed to have a sector winner and dominate it by operating super well
creativity not required rn
@95thoughts@halvorz@SkepticalAlpaca ya
can pick any random two variables and come up with a null result if you want .. it’s only interesting when it’s surprising
consider there’s a guy at Goldman Sachs who knows everything about the financing of grains but only when they’re on a container ship in the Atlantic and no other situation
@Mihoda@eigenrobot there will always be empirical truths worth knowing that aren’t close enough to the rigors of the market to get that Darwinian benefit
@Teleonomic no not just from a moral perspective
a person who cares more about winning than truth will intelligently cheat and publish subtly false results
@Mihoda@eigenrobot like there’s an sufficient amount of Darwinian pressure to find the optimal temperature of a McDonald’s coffee
but the farther it gets from real products the more suspicious that motivation gets
many great tweeters who instantly take on a turgid professorial tone as soon as they start writing essays
you can beef up the language a bit but dont make it ridiculous lol
scicomm is an A tier grift
you get to launder the the gravitas of the scientists and the average person will never find out you didn’t really made research contributions
@Alephwyr yeah in fact the opposite
it’s terrible for good science
the moment Einstein became a celebrity is when he really stopped publishing things of crazy value
@Alephwyr yeah but like
very few people get the gift of semantic immortality … where people remember your name and the things you said long after you’re dead
and regardless of what it does to their careers I think the scientists are more deserving of it than the communicators
we live in a world where Tylenol happens to somehow also soothe emotional pain and you think taping your face into a smile to create happiness is ridiculous. smh
tech ruins your intuition for market valuations. boring ass companies like docusign are worth $50 billion and then media companies with enormous cultural impact are like Vox: $750m . A24: $2 billion
@minobenjo as in like
if i plant a nice flower garden in front of my house, this creates value for me and for my neighbors, and everyone that walks by. the market will not compensate me for this
@halvorz but imo more importantly — a researcher in an academic lab has a much longer iteration cycle not just because of compute but bc they won’t have a handful of engineers to help them
@fchollet@MegaBasedChad francois i'm genuinely curious when was i a jerk to you in the last few days? i dont think weve interacted since my joke reply in 2018
@stelladingus@alth0u i think the latter has enormously good experimental at the trial phase and in the retrospective across billions of doses administered
@stelladingus@alth0u i dunno man i dabble in a fair amount of "forbidden" ideas. wouldn't want my twitter found at work. dont know if you can follow my feed and think i'm a #resist #trustthescience lib
consider i might just consider bret's position to be idiotic and deserving of derision
@stelladingus@alth0u imo in many debates, like HCQ or lab leak or masks, the merits of either side of the argument were muddled and unclear, the effect sizes small, and i preferred devolution of power
but there has never been a home run like the mrna covid vax. i dont think bret is being honest
@stelladingus@alth0u as you say, ivermectin is cheap so his plan cannot be to sell drugs -- this has never been the profitable venture. the profitability avenue is just in publicity / creating a name for yourself as a silenced dissident and selling books later
@moultano@halvorz for some reason i remember a bunch of these pareto tradeoff charts between CFR and R_0 so i thought that must be some sort of empirical relationship
@sorkincel unfortunately it requires a massive cohort of people believing they're changing the world for the 0.1% of them to actually change the world. so i support their zealotry
@sorkincel i think its the same thing really. people put up with unpleasant people when they're useful in some way
this is the whole concept behind the show House
@LudditeHacker you say ignorance like anyone knows the truth abt whether a thing will work out and become real
you can make gambles that's all and i far prefer gamblers to people who fold
@TeddyRaccovelt@AOCummies well the round trip ticket sf to dc was like $1k & also my housing situation is absolutely fucked here have to take care of it this weekend
@TetraspaceWest the universe basically knows when one particle is measured and collapses the wavefunction of the other instantly no matter how far away it is
@AngularOcean I don’t even believe it but this particular comparison makes me want to object every time bc it’s born of a desire to sound clever than look at things clearly
if we are gonna completely honest nobody of sound mind can actually starve to death on the streets in the first world. the welfare system will save you far before that https://x.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1415771896717529088
running out of money is only bad insofar as you need to “explain yourself” to the government. anyway sort of unrelated to qc I’m just on my shit abt the difference between American and global poverty again
@Alephwyr glad to hear your insights. I may have a rosy view of how well American welfare works. Seems like administrative issues more than simply not giving enough $$$
how does wework not even have flexible desk pricing? they were charging $30/desk/day in the middle of the pandemic for completely empty weworks. fundamentally NGMI
@Jayasimha108@IndianHistory0@AgainstGop in practice, what does it mean? that hindus should care less about egalitarian outcomes? that caste system should stay strong? or something else
@grantadever@powerbottomdad1@leepavelich chin up king, pointing out the newness of one's account is non-lindy cope. they are a fad, their expected lifetime is short
@alth0u if someone proposes an experiment there should be a far greater than random chance that there's a real correlation no? nobody in the social sciences would study something if they didn't think have a hunch it was real
@monodevice exactly, the tru american ideology
there are huge downsides (wealthy are not funding high art, dont immediately give an aesthetic to aspire for) but i think its by and large net positive for everyone else who is not a topwit high energy manager
@baandlibro fact of the matter is, worldview matters very little. people are right all the time for the wrong reasons. never buy into rich = smart meme
@Conaw all my tweets should be read through the lens of Carlos’ knowing smirk in my pfp. Just poking fun and channeling a bit of chaos… I love all of you!
@lisatomic5 yeah which, alongside his general normalness on eigenpod makes me feel like QC plays up a fake vibe of incompetence here, which I don’t understand
@lisatomic5 charitably it can just be an attempt to be self deprecating and friendly gone awry but more cynically it feels like some kind of gifted kid self harm routine
@lisatomic5 listening to him on eigenpod, he really didn’t seem that down on himself. I remember he said something like “I could be as good a blogger as SSC if I tried”. I definitely relate to the concept of objectively nice achievements never really being emotionally satisfying but hmm
@costa11235@BarneyFlames Agree on the latter part
hard to say what the long term consequences of Bernanke Thought are but being super mad about QE all the time is definitely midwit
@rohn_jawls@TeddyRaccovelt yeah it’s a huge cope people are getting hotter and hotter. you can see it in the movies and in real life. Keep pumping those seed oils
@rmcwhorter99 there are parts of town it will be unpleasant and dangerous to live in. There are parts of town that are nice and catered for the more affluent. Generally tho it seems that the vast majority of the tech industry is still concentrated here
@rmcwhorter99 “Dangerous” is exaggerated here it’s more like you’ll be uncomfortable at the level of homelessness and clearly mentally ill folks. Mostly harmless tho
@TeddyRaccovelt the last one may be an ideal more than a prediction bc I’m pretty sure he’s invested in space defense stuff
and I think economic trade certainly makes starting a real war harder but not impossible
@TeddyRaccovelt how would this work? you’d have to accelerate the tungsten a lot in the retrograde direction right? I guess you’d need a really big satellite with lots of extra fuel
@ollyrobot@TeddyRaccovelt yeah seems super difficult to move massive weapons to orbit
every ounce of destructive energy has to be supplied on the way up (and more due to rocket eqn)
@alth0u@bayes_baes ^ rather hear about work (as long as it’s interesting and not like L4 googler) than the 15th debate about which neighborhood in sf is the coolest
@eigenrobot also im young and a lot of what ppl do for day job is novel in my eyes
I would love to find many of you and pick your brain on your area or expertise. mostly I want halvorz to explain biology to me
@ollyrobot Chin up king we’ll all live in cyberpunk megacities soon enough. luxury flat $200/month, subway system too logical for human minds to comprehend
@lisatomic5 all the Hindus and Muslims from India are like this … they will all theoretically hate the other side but then have close friends from the other camp that they’ll call to their gatherings and stuff
@bayes_baes@chiefofstuffs@alth0u said it somewhere else before but i have zero sympathy 4 people trying to secure the bag doing things they think are evil / net negative, esp ppl making high 6 figs
@bayes_baes@chiefofstuffs@alth0u but yeah totally fair for someone who doesn’t think it’s evil & just would rather clock out not talk about it after work and fund their other ventures in life
it’s a widely known secret that nuclear energy is not actually that economically attractive but it is masculine coded and owns the hippies and is therefore an unalloyed good
amphetamine may be neurotoxic, but it also helps a lot of low conscientiousness people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,
@Duderichy this is a pure shitpost, i will continue to prescribe myself amphetamines
also the neurotoxicity is pretty much nonexistent at low clinical doses
@iamgingertrash@BarneyFlames not fully convinced by this but yeah maybe
it seems sus to me to say that all countries in the world are beholden to the same intellectual fashion, especially one that could be so potentially dangerous to a key input (energy) for industrial society
@BarneyFlames@iamgingertrash right so we have
- supply chains are regulated by EU
- risk of triggering nuclear proliferation treaties
- renewables are popular globally
its not that these aren't strong reasons; its that if the financial growth incentive was high enough, all could be overcome
thinking about this more ... i'm very much temperamentally liberal w/ fuck it ship it mindset & highly value experimentation even when poorly thought out
kinda strange how little that maps to modern left of center politics
@alth0u it has great abstractions in the form of “cities” and “states”
as close to an A/B test platform as we’ll get without bringing Lee kuan yew back from the grave