edbaskerville

The personality defect that leads you to become powerful is the same defect that makes you want to become even more powerful.

It's the job of the rest of us to restructure the system to prevent this kind of pathological runaway power accumulation. It means new laws, but also a more enlightened culture.

> Then starting in 1905, Albert Einstein published a series of papers in which he hythesized that the pollen particles were moving because they were being bombarded by invisible molecules in the liquid...At the time, this theory was controversial, because the idea of molecules was not yet widely accepted.

What? The idea of molecules was not widely accepted in 1905?

Way too many John Le Carré novels (and his memoir). Not escapist enough, frankly—it adds up to a very dismal appraisal of geopolitics, with plenty of foreshadowing of what the world has become: the kleptocracy in the ruins of the Soviet state; having fought communism, the need to now fight capitalism; and this one I saved from The Little Drummer Girl: "What are we to become, I wonder? A Jewish homeland, or an ugly little Spartan state?"

Deterministic chaos is cool. But this is even more special in a sense: for a problem where random initial conditions are almost always chaotic, this is a catalog of periodic orbits—these are all non-chaotic.

It would be cool to pair this with a numerical simulator that shows what happens when you perturb any of them.

EDIT: oh, it already does this, thanks other comments

Apple was at its best and most creative during the long Steveless interregnum. The inmates were running the asylum, so they couldn't ship products or make money. But it definitely seemed weirder and more fun, at least from the outside.

Can someone answer this for wheels on luggage?

Unsurprisingly this one generated a lot of responses.

My working hypothesis for this question involves colonization, technologically driven scales of time and space, and selection. The essence is totally obvious: either you develop sustainable practices or you go extinct.

Consider a group of people colonizing an area previously uninhabited by humans. When they arrive, they will disrupt the local ecosystem to some extent.

In some cases, the new combined system of ecosystem structure and human culture will settle into an attractor that can support humans for a long time (relative to frequency of colonization). In other cases, it will not, and the human population will die out. (Externally driven parameter changes can also turn a sustainable system into an unsustainable one.)

With a low enough colonization rate, most active communities will be operating sustainably.

Over time, technology increases the rate of spread of humanity. Cultures with more advanced technology increasingly spread into existing settlements as well as taking over existing land.

But the basic process continues: some systems last; some do not. The ones that last longer are the ones with sustainable practices.

This process is now operating at a global scale. Either we get sustainable, or things get bad.

Some people have concluded that the easier path is to colonize other planets.

Exact same story here. Same age kids (well, one just turned 5). I wonder how many CDs are being sold just because of parents trying to protect their kids from device addiction.

Emphasizing this response. Bayesian models can always produce simple probabilities if you ask them to. E.g., given this data, what is the probability that the next flip is heads?

The fact that the model is represented as a distribution over Bernoulli parameter p doesn't contradict this: you just integrate over the posterior.

I can't tell if you think this is a good thing or a bad thing that men use big trucks to compensate for a masculine sense of inadequacy. But I think this is a good point, and I think we need to fight against it.

I don't think it's politically impossible. These things are killing children (among many other people). "Giant trucks and SUVs are killing children" seems like a pretty powerful line.

I don't have perfect pitch—I can't name notes and chords instantly out of thin air—but I'm a musician and can immediately sense if the tuning is nonstandard. It can be trippy. I think that, yeah, it's basically a matter of personality whether it annoys you or intrigues you, perfect pitch or no...

I'm currently practicing for a show with my cello tuned down a half-step, and it strongly conflicts with my ear<->muscle memory. Similar experiences when jumping between standard tuning and the Bach 5th Suite (A string tuned down to G) or Kodaly Solo Sonata (lower two strings tuned down a half step).

I find KDE to be a bit like using Mac OS 9 with extra customization--not in a literal sense, but in terms of the ethos. It looks more like, say, late-90s Windows, but the UX is more consistent in a old Mac-like way, albeit with some rough, this-is-a-community-project edges.

GNOME seems to be trying to oversimplify and prettify like today's Apple, but yes, makes weird decisions. But Apple is definitely worse than either in terms of feature/design churn.

Hoping to use this to reboot an ancient abandoned project. At the time there wasn't a mature P2P connection layer that took care of all the realities of the modern Internet out of the box. Now there is, and it's great to see.

This isn't Tailscale because it does secure P2P connections between any pair of devices, whether or not they have Tailscale. This enables real end-user P2P for, e.g., local-first apps with no server infrastructure except relays for resilience. And even if you lose the relay servers, things keep on working the same for any hosts that don't need them.