alex_young

21 時間前議論

  The Library, or part of its collection, was accidentally burned by Julius Caesar during his civil war in 48 BC, but it is unclear how much was actually destroyed

alex_young

昨日議論

Did it not burn? Was it not the most extensive library of human writing at that time? Please help us all understand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria

alex_young

昨日議論

Perhaps the burning of the library at Alexandria would qualify. How intentional that was is somewhat in question, but the world certainly turned its back on the only collection of written knowledge and let it turn to ash.

alex_young

12 日前議論

The 4th amendment protects people from unreasonable searches by the government. It does not require businesses to do anything special. There are plenty of great reasons to, and even other legal requirements to, protect and limit information gathered by businesses about individuals, but the 4th isn’t one of them.

alex_young

14 日前議論

I worked for one such employer long ago that would “accidentally” bounce paychecks.

This happened with such regularity that people would take their checks to said employer’s bank on payday and stand in line to cash them before heading to the office. You’d see a couple of coworkers in line to do this.

Maintaining a list like this is probably not super useful. Any company that does this kind of stuff as a routine will not continue the routine of employing people for long.

alex_young

14 日前議論

[flagged]

alex_young

30 日前議論

A reverse centaur is just a person with a horse head right? I don’t get the analogy. I understand he’s talking about getting pushed around by an LLM, but would a normal centaur push an LLM around? It doesn’t even have any hands right? Seems like a reverse centaur is more capable of typing.

alex_young

先月議論

Does this not work with HomePod? How is an AI voice assistant not compatible with the smart speaker?

alex_young

先月議論

Conservation easements are a thing. Many people support protecting natural spaces and the law is composed of such general understandings.

alex_young

先月議論

  The U.S. Treasury publishes a daily total of the national debt, which as of May 2026 was $39 trillion.

  a little less than half of the total national debt is owed to the "Federal Reserve and intragovernmental holdings"

  In December 2020, foreigners held 33% ($7 trillion out of $21.6 trillion) of publicly held U.S. debt

[~] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_St...

alex_young

先月議論

  a flight attendant told passengers over the PA system that they "must turn off Bluetooth immediately," or else the aircraft would have to turn around.

alex_young

先月議論

How would turning bluetooth off convince anyone that there isn't a bomb on board? It seems like the bluetooth offering is the least of our worries in the insane case that this is how a threat was delivered.

alex_young

先月議論

I read it, but I don't think it's compelling. "the short run can be a lifetime" is kind of a throw away phrase not backed by evidence.

We've seen rapid growth of knowledge work at the same time as increased productivity, and there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason that greater productivity will reverse this persistent trend.

alex_young

先月議論

The small town constraint is a bit artificial to this problem isn't it?

If you operate a machine shop in a large urban area, have competitors, and access to much improved low cost tooling, would you:

a) lay off a bunch of workers, or b) lower your prices and capture more orders?

Same thing with accounting firms or marketers or business consultants.

alex_young

先月議論

Why is this time different?

Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so?

If company A decides they just want the same slice of the market they have now and can fire half of their employees and pocket $$$, can't company B hire the same workers and compete harder with these new extra productive workers they hired? Won't the company B tend to capture more of the market and thus survive longer?

In nature we say there are no unfilled niches, meaning that if there were space for something to come compete for resources, it would quickly be 'solved' by the motivating factors involved. Not a precise thing, but a good heuristic.

US knowledge-worker compensation is around $10T / year. Anthropic and OpenAI have raised (not spent yet, just raised) $317B. That's ~3% of knowledge worker spending in one year alone. What business wouldn't pay 3, 5 or 10% more a year to make their worker productivity increase by larger factors?

alex_young

2 か月前議論

  Someone replied. It was the exact same text the AI had given me.

How would this happen? I thought most of these things used random seeds when returning responses. I understand similar, but exactly the same seems pretty odd if 2 people use the same prompt in 2 sessions.

alex_young

2 か月前議論

You would also need vehicle miles traveled and pedestrian miles traveled. The overall numbers are up, and there is ample evidence that US cities are both less walkable and more dangerous to walk in than our counterparts in Europe. Just because people don’t let their kids walk places doesn’t indicate that vehicles don’t hit kids.

alex_young

2 か月前議論

Pedestrian vehicle fatalities are up over 40 years, have increased significantly recently, and are a very real problem. https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...

alex_young

2 か月前議論

I want to let my kids walk wherever they want to. It’s great for them.

My 5 year old bikes to school, accompanied by an adult. It’s a bit more than half a mile away from the house.

I’d like to tell him he can do this on his own next year, but there’s a single intersection he has to cross that makes this difficult.

I’m not worried about him getting lost, abducted by a stranger or any host of movie plot scenarios. I’m worried about vehicles. Specifically pickup trucks and SUVs.

40 years ago a 5 or 6 year old mostly had to contend with sedans with hoods lower than 30 inches. Today there are large numbers of vehicles twice that high, where even an adult can’t look the driver in the eye at close distances.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says:

  Vehicles with hood heights of more than 40 inches and blunt front ends angled at greater than 65 degrees were 44 percent more likely to cause fatalities.

https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/vehicles-with-higher-more-v...

I’ll probably let him bike alone anyway. But it’s a different equation because of the cars.

alex_young

2 か月前議論

I live in a town of fewer than 8k people. Our local toy store is not only thriving, it’s central to the community.

People would rather shop there than go online. Why? Because they are a part of the community.

At every farmer’s market or community event they have a booth giving out free glitter tattoos to children, and they employ several teenagers part time to wrap gifts (of course this is free too), apply tattoos, and help out in the store.

This isn’t a unique concept. Going the extra mile and doing seemingly unreasonably nice things wins you customers and loyalty.

alex_young

投稿

Digital devices are being used to comfort babies and parents

Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX

Human brain cells on a chip learned to play Doom in a week

Joint Statement from OpenAI and Microsoft

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