aaronsimpson's comments

I appreciate you finding a way to so eloquently put your thoughts into words. For the longest time, I always felt like a terrible person or somehow socially or emotionally broken for being unable to respond to others grief. It's not that I couldn't imagine it or somewhat feel how they were feeling, but simply the wish that there was sentence or string of words I could put together to make it all okay. I guess anyone who has ever loved someone has felt the same :(

Godspeed.

I don't know about the previous author or if it's even his best, but I learned about Lars through a Slate Star Codex guest post 2-3 years ago. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-...

I think the absolute best pitch for LLMs is a natural language interface to things like PDFs. The vision of being able to "talk to" a book or paper rather than having to scroll and scroll is compelling. The same obviously also would apply to the Internet. For some reason, they just can't seem to pull that off. Asking ChatGPT to summarize an article is just a disaster.

This is often brought up and I'm fully willing to be shown that I'm out of touch, but where are people buying these supposed "expensive" eggs and groceries? I'll literally share my last grocery receipt (admittedly smaller due to already having most ingredients):

- Chicken thighs $6.24

- Ground beef $5.97

- Feminine items $9.97

- Bell pepper $0.82

- Lettuce $1.77

- Celery $2.98

- Shrimp $7.92

- Tortilla soup $3.82

- Yogurt (single) $0.64

- Diced tomatoes $0.96

- Black beans $0.82

- Yogurt (pack) $2.47

- Andouille sausage $3.94

Total: $51.24

Sampling from other receipts I've got milk at $3.33, lunchmeat $4.46, my last gas bill was $18.65 to fill up. So far in January, shopping at Walmart and with a crockpot, I've been able to feed myself and my girlfriend for around $139. Fair disclaimer I live in a LCOL metro but was it ever really cheaper than this?

Predictions for 2024

- Trump/Scott P/VP ticket.

- Biden/Trump election is about as close as 2020. Trying to avoid partisanship, but I predict a narrow Biden victory.

- Biden loses Nevada, but keeps Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and very narrowly Michigan.

- Trump repeats his rage and cries of fraud at his second loss. This is taken even less seriously than the first time. Fox News in particular is more measured.

- Regardless of election outcome, lessons learned from J6 and congressional certification is far more protected by DC Police and National Guard. Protests in other cities get quelled without much fanfare. Maybe at most a high-profile shooting death.

- Settlement in Ukraine reached. Ukraine likely loses the Donbas and Crimea, but keeps Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, and Kherson. Frozen conflict/ceasefire in the vein of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia.

- China doesn't invade Taiwan.

- Google Gemini isn't as powerful as expected and Google AI efforts continue to flop.

- Hype around LLMs starts to die down a bit. More adoption, but less hype about AGI about to take over.

- No meaningful impacts to employment from artificial intelligence.

- Some kind of innovation in geothermal energy that increases its prominence above wind.

- Inflation drops to 2%.

- Fed gently drops rates - I'd be utterly shocked if it was more than 1 to 1 and a half basis points.

- Marianne Williamson drops before Super Tuesday.

- RFK Jr. campaign implodes by October with some other controversy on par with Jewish comments.

- End to conflict in Red Sea with the Houthis. Lasts until late spring 2024.

- Another mass school shooting happens in the United States.

- Israel ceases assault on Gaza with minimal progress towards any kind of two-state solution. Back to status quo with a weaker coalition behind Netanyahu.

- Apple Vision pushes VR to decent adoption amongst mainstream consumers.

- New iPhone marginally better than the previous generation.

- Bitcoin hits $70k

- Continued dip in Marvel quality, but no cease in ticket sales.

- (stealing from another comment) Dropbox LLM

- Twitter/X still exists. Advertisers probably return. Elon is still dumb.

- Trump is convicted in one of: classified documents case or defrauding American people. Potential acquittal or settlement in hush money case.

A lot of variables and uncertainty. You have to remember we live in a bubble of people ultra-focused and attached to the news. Many others aren't as focused yet. As we get closer and election season is the top story of the news cycle, I expect polling to shake out in a different direction.

To help illustrate: the election is 10 months away. 10 months ago was February 27th. Back then, there was prominent argument and speculation that Ron DeSantis was the future of the Republican Party. Look at his polling now.

VR inevitably getting smaller and cheaper will give us the "hologram of person in the living room" sci-fi fantasy we've always dreamed of. It won't be a replacement, but similar to the way it's viewed in movies and TV shows as a "future phone call".

This just isn't true, especially in areas where housing costs are the worst. I don't have a citation right now, but I'm pretty sure a city in Canada attempted this (Vancouver?) and the returns were paltry, because the underlying fact just wasn't true. There is no glut of empty apartments and condos in markets like California, New York, Washington, Florida, Washington D.C., etc. full stop.

As soon as I deleted the app from my phone and established a "can only view Twitter on my laptop" rule, I basically stopped using it.

I've been on a Twitter break the past two weeks and it's been pretty glorious all things considered. The only thing I really do miss - and will miss if the platform dies - is that ability to be connected to the thoughts of people I want.

The question of what happens to the blogosphere types if/when Twitter explodes matters a lot to me. Idk if Substack is the right answer.

The vast majority of COTUS has at least an undergrad, with more than a few having Ivy League credentials or JDs, making them more educated than 70% of the people in the country from some of the highest tier law schools in the country. I know HN has a bias toward SV, and therefore against non-STEMlords, lawyers, and MBAs, but that’s not “minimally-educated”.

Also, it’s probably not donors when the majority of their base is still skeptical of climate science: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/18/for-earth...

I think your understanding of how consumers come to the decisions they do is sorely lacking in terms of stripping agency from the people that consume. We're not blank slate robots.

Is globalization really the result of corrupt leaders though, or a shift in corporate practice to accommodate the rising demands of consumers? It seems like no amount of corruption really matters as long as we're drinking lattes and eating avocado every day.

The question I have - at what point do Instagram and Facebook converge such to the point that it's not even worth having them as separate apps anymore? At a certain point, I imagine Meta would like these apps to all combine into one united "Meta" app.

That Gilens and Page study has been debunked time and time again by various followup studies. Overwhelmingly the American people get their way. If not that, just look at direct polls from sources like Gallup. Even amongst climate-conscious progressives, the will to pay extra for gas or beef to negate climate change just isn't there.

Edit: as a test question for anyone who believes this 90% nonsense - can you name a single piece of high-priority, salient legislation (i.e. not an executive order or Supreme Court decision) that a vast majority of Americans didn't want, but that went through anyway because the government did the bidding of the corporations?

Overwhelmingly, the reason why we don't get policies like climate change mitigation, universal healthcare, housing, etc. is because Americans are just fundamentally divided on these topics. And where they are somewhat "united" (say, a public option for healthcare), they don't want to increase taxes to pay for it.

(High-priority and salient because things like dairy trade policy are probably influenced more by lobbying, but that's because most Americans obviously don't care about dairy trade policy)

The amount of Elon charity in this comment section is kind of insane:

> In an email, Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president, said the letter had made other employees “feel uncomfortable, intimidated and bullied.”

It's literally the same thing wokescolds do when somebody says anything they disagree with, only this time it's SpaceX and Elon Musk. There's not really any good argument for somebody who claims to care about free speech.

"It's a private company. They can fire whoever they want so long as it's not a protected class." And Twitter is a private company that can ban anybody they want. Don't like it? Go to Mastodon. Usually this argument doesn't fly for the people that defend his Twitter free speech position.

Not enough people realize this. I was reading Obama's memoir recently and he mentioned this exact concept during the financial crisis, where everyone wanted him to publicly skewer the big banks and talk trash on their CEOs. The problem is, those same big banks are (1) the ones he's trying to convince to re-invest back into the market and stimulate the economy and (2) probably the ones most knowledgable on how to rebuild and fix the financial sector. It's not corruption any more than the NFL hiring Peyton Manning as commissioner would be "corruption"

> Minimum of 14 weeks of severance plus an additional 2 weeks for every year of employment beyond 1 year.

This feels super generous to me. Is it standard par for growing companies and Silicon Valley?

I always have to adjust for this as an early-career engineer aspiring to start my own startup. It's insanely intimidating looking at companies with multi-million or billion-dollar valuations, but my definition of a "successful" company is probably vastly different than what most hyper-growth VCs are looking for.

I'm always more interested in the low-fixed-cost software businesses like Sublime Text, Pinboard, or Hwaci (SQLite)

That's been my biggest frustration as an engineer reading this - is people seeing "CHANGES TO TWITTER CODEBASE FROZEN!!!" as if it's part of some story of leftist anti-Elon engineers that would sabotage the codebase, rather than standard tech acquisition practice.