kiliantics

há 4 mesesdiscuss

There are a lot of baked in assumptions here. For instance, as an extreme example, betting on nuclear war or climate collapse happening and then "winning" doesn't really provide you anything of much use in the society you will be living in after such events.

kiliantics

há 5 mesesdiscuss

While the idea in the post is an interesting one, the analogy to planing is terrible. The difference in results from a power planer and a hand plane (even with a pretty basic blade) is night and day. Wood planed with high quality and sharp steel has a finish that doesn't even need oil or varnish.

People talk about how non-AI code will become an artisanal craft and I think it's a bit of a stretch. The one exception might be when code has an intrinsic aesthetic quality in itself, rather than just the functional output, something like the obfuscated C code competition entries. Hand-worked wood might be crappy too, like a school woodwork birdhouse project made by a beginner, but a truly artisanally crafted piece of furniture or cabinetry has a very tangibly superior output to an IKEA bookshelf or other industrial stuff.

On the point of doing work for the sake of doing work and not for the sake of the value of the output, this is nothing new, as suggested in the blog post. But the more apt analogy would be all the "bullshit jobs" that have existed for decades in modern corporations. People who expand their teams to justify more budget to hire more people to create more work to expand their teams to get bigger budgets, etc. All the while producing nothing of real value in the company. The thing that AI seems to have done is accelerated and exaggerated this tendency, maybe since it was already the natural tendency within the logic of our corporate work culture.

kiliantics

há 5 mesesdiscuss

I took a boat ride in Maine on a lobster boat once that was owned and operated by a man in his 90s. Someone else in the town told me that he was being pressured to stop working by his family because he had recently fallen out of the boat while lobstering alone and broken a rib. He still managed to climb back into the boat with his injury and get home. It's a different America up there.

kiliantics

há 6 mesesdiscuss

The phrasing in the article shows very strong bias towards Israel in general

kiliantics

há 6 mesesdiscuss

It's about how the taxes are spent too. If the government cuts welfare and gives handouts and subsidies to special interests, that is not an effective redistribution.

kiliantics

há 6 mesesdiscuss

I'm a European living in the US and my sense is that perceptions towards AI are generally more positive here than in Europe if anything (I do work in tech though which skews things a good bit).

This article almost feels like some kind of psychological manipulation: "Jeez Americans, can't you just get on board like the rest of the world?"

kiliantics

há 7 mesesdiscuss

Check out forum.woodenboat.com to read from a lot of amateurs taking on the project, just be warned that the rabbit hole is alluring and very deep.

It's typically not recommended to self-design, the physics gets technical and there are a lot of free working plans out there including by famous naval architects.

Most people start out with simpler designs using plywood and fiberglass but, due to my aforementioned disdain for a lot of modern approaches, I personally went with a traditional oak frame, cedar plank, copper rivet construction. It is very time consuming but I'm enjoying the journey. I chose a flat-bottomed sail boat design (dory) to make it a little easier on myself.

There are endless variations on the concept of a "wooden vessel that can be propelled through water" idea so it really depends on your interests and tastes. It's a "form follows function" situation too, so you also need to consider your use case -- engine, oar, sail; ocean, river, lake; etc.

kiliantics

há 7 mesesdiscuss

Same, specifically boat-building for me because it just draws me in.

But more generally, I would like to commit my time to making the built world more beautiful and sustainable. I despise the obsolescent plastic slop that we all are forced to use, wear, live in, and just see and be around all the time. I find it such a degradation in our society -- the shift in taste and values away from an appreciation of well-made, durable, and well-designed physical objects.

kiliantics

há 7 mesesdiscuss

Taxes used to be based only on property rather than labour, maybe we should go back to that. Of course this won't happen as it is a force of wealth-deconcentration.

kiliantics

há 7 mesesdiscuss

Most left wing movements and organisations in the West drew strength from the existence of strong socialist states, both materially and ideologically. These kinds of groups were a balancing force against the right wing/capitalist direction, which is inherently undemocratic, having as its logical endpoint the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few.

I think the true decline begun earlier though, around the Thatcher-Reagan era, with the erosion of all kinds of state ownership and control of our economy and broad attacks on organised labour.

kiliantics

há 9 mesesdiscuss

Wouldn't really be to my taste either but this whole story just reminded me of how much more interestingly the wealthy used to spend their money.

What legacies of high craftsmanship will be left by Musk and Bezos and their ilk? The rich seem to have collectively decided to no longer value good taste.

And I believe this has downstream effects on the aesthetics of everyday things for the average person too. It seems the average person will never again enjoy public works projects that are aesthetically beautiful, like say the Brooklyn Bridge or New York Public Library. All the craftsmen required to build such things no longer exist because the wealthy do not employ them.

kiliantics

há 11 mesesdiscuss

Duration of the signal, along with intensity variation, is consistent with the duration of any possible point source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal#Time_variation

kiliantics

há 4 anosdiscuss

This kind of information is easy to google and also easy to prove to yourself by just making an honest attempt to get places by bicycle. But here is one example of a study:

https://www.fastcompany.com/1707222/bike-computer-study-prov...

I am not a traffic engineer but I think if you know a few simple numbers like average travel distance, average car size, bike size, etc. you can see how it will be difficult to design any system where cars will beat bicycles. The only conceivable way for this to work is to space everything 20 miles apart with 8 lane highways connecting them and even then you still have last mile problems in such a system that necessarily slows things down. Even the freeways themselves can be bumper to bumper at rush hour, just look at the Katy Freeway in Houston.

Basically, there are already bottlenecks in car traffic systems and there is no way to avoid them because of induced demand. Adding cycling infrastructure will not hurt drivers but would help get more people on bikes.

kiliantics

há 4 anosdiscuss

The funny thing though is that, in most urban settings, this is completely untrue. Cyclists actually speed things up by creating less traffic. Every cyclist on the road means less cars on the road.

And the speed of traffic is not determined by the speed of the cars, which most drivers seem to believe for some reason. In a city, the speed of traffic is entirely determined by the stop signals. There is a fixed time it will take you to get from A to B if you abide by the rules and don't run through every stop light. That fixed time depends somewhat on how many other cars are on the road, since you might wait for several signal changes at each light but the light changes have often been designed for throughput.

So even though you think you can go faster than the cyclist, you likely can't, at least averaged over your journey. They are probably actually going faster than you on average. Sure, you can drive faster for that short stretch before the next light, but what's the point? You are just burning more gas and if you pull some "skillful" weaving maneuvres around the cyclist, then you are endangering lives too.

kiliantics

há 7 anosdiscuss

Build it as a co-operative where all the workers (and maybe even consumers) are also owners of the organisation, and have equal say in how it is run. Combine this with a clear mission and set of principles that all new members are taught so the organisation will stay on track for its initial purpose and keep democratic and equitable control.

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