electrograv

Imagine the danger and legitimate fear a stalking victim would face if there was a public real-time tracker for any license plate query you can imagine.

I can’t find a screenshot of it anywhere, let alone the landing page.

Eating roadkill isn’t much different from eating wild game you hunted — except with roadkill, it was someone else and their car that killed it accidentally, rather you and a gun intentionally.

“So if the severed head isn’t alive, the disembodied heart isn’t alive, the jar of blood we drained out isn’t alive - then what are you saying is alive and thinking?”

- Some silicon alien life forms somewhere debating whether the human life form they just disassembled could ever be alive and thinking

It’s a little sad to me that fundamental innovations in electromechanical engineering like this get just a few million in investment, yet if this had been yet another derivative software startup with “AI” in the pitch, they’d probably have 10x+ or more investments being thrown at them.

Those private banks can print that money out of thin air because government allows them to. And the government officials (many formerly financial executives) allow them to because they “have to” to prevent “disastrous” private banking/financial collapse.

But if you or I wanted to play the same games to print our own money they way they do? No, that would be wrong and dangerous and illegal!

So it’s pretty clear that both government and private financial institutions are tightly coupled partners in a mostly corrupt, intentionally obfuscated shell game that primarily serves to keep money and power steadily flowing into the hands of the already wealthy and powerful.

Just look at who is actually held accountable for financial crimes. Some individual trader that finds and exploits some glitch that allows them to profit from the wealthy? Straight to jail. High ranking institutional powers (government and private) that implement often illegal schemes that continuously siphon wealth from common people into their hands? Slap on the wrist at most.

I probably should generalize my thoughts though to say “expectation of economic growth” (instead of just “money printing”) seems to me necessary to yield “opaque market insanity”, as opposed to “transparent evil sanity”.

As a thought experiment, consider a (practically impossible) scenario where there is universally no expectation for long-term economic growth/contraction — regardless of whether it’s “real” or just monetary. Then by definition, a long term market simply cannot exist at all. No amount of wealth inequality can cause market insanity if there is no (long-term) market at all.

Wealth inequality in such a situation can still yield hoarding, domination, conquest, control, scams, manipulations, etc. But I wouldn’t call that “market insanity” so much as “evil sanity”.

In practice, the real impact of wealth inequality on the common people would likely be the same either way. However, without long term economic growth/inflation, the “sane evil” of the greedy wealth can no longer hide behind the veil of “market insanity”.

Cue the famous quote: “The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

I have a vague theory that as the amount of wealth inequality increases in a system along with “money printing” (lending, hypothecation, etc where the wealthy are permitted privileged leverage and risk), the more detached markets become from reality in general. In such a case, an increasing majority of the money circulating has no need to be grounded in anything close to the common basic needs and values that most normal people have to live with.

Instead, most important to such wealth is to tap into the source of inflation to be on the winning side of that. This becomes a game of its own, where an investment’s connection to reality or fundamental value is mostly irrelevant compared to how it leverages or monopolizes the state-created and privately created instruments of “money printing” (sketchy lending, rehypothecation, etc.) and other such “games” that only the wealthy are allowed in on.

UB doesn’t occupy the author’s mind when writing C, when it really should. This kind of lazy attitude to memory safety is precisely why so much C code is notoriously riddled with memory bugs and security vulnerabilities.

Because:

(1) Laptop models designed to run Linux out of the box are very scarce, with very few options to choose from.

(2) Of the few that do exist, I’ve never seen any even remotely close to being competitive with Apple’s laptops (in terms of hardware quality, and good performance with excellent power efficiency / fanless / thermals / battery life).

Part of that is due to Apple’s monopoly on the superiority of their M series chips. But the rest I assume comes from less R&D investment generally in the Linux laptop space due to it being such a small niche, unfortunately.

I am not seeing this alleged crowd of people insisting that everyone needs 120hz/ProMotion. This seems to be a red herring.

I am seeing a crowd of people (including myself) saying that we experience 120hz/ProMotion as a huge improvement over 60hz, so much so that we will never buy a product without this ever again (so long as we have the choice).

I furthermore claim that while not everyone is a member of this crowd (obviously), it represents a sufficiently large share of the device-buying population to justify steering billions of dollars of hardware and software industry to support this, which evidently has happened and increasingly continues to happen.

If this crowd were an insignificant minority as you seem to imply, then 120hz displays would be a fad that fades away in all but the most niche markets (e.g. pro gaming), and yet we’re seeing precisely the opposite happen — 120hz displays are growing in popularity by expanding broadly into increasingly non-niche consumer device products everywhere, from laptops to tablets to phones.

> When clearly the market has said otherwise, given Apple's success for many, many years with 60Hz screens.

Arguing that the market doesn’t want/need it now because Apple succeeded without it in the past, is completely absurd — just as nonsensical as trying to argue that computers don’t ever need any more memory because they sold just fine with less in the past.

It would be no different than arguing about whether we need all three primary colors (red, green, blue) with someone who is colorblind (and unaware of this). Or like arguing whether speakers benefit from being able to reproduce a certain frequency, with someone who is partially or fully deaf at that frequency. And I truly mean no disrespect to anyone with different perception abilities in these or any other domains.

Recognizing that large differences exist here is essential to make sense of the reality - that something that seems completely unimportant or barely noticeable to you, could actually be a hugely obvious and important difference to many others (whether it’s a certain screen refresh rate, the presence of a primary color you cannot perceive but others can, an audio frequency you cannot hear but others can, or otherwise).

There is a well-understood science to both auditory and visual perception, even more concretely so for the visual side. The scientific literature on human perception in both categories is actively used in the engineering of almost every modern (audible/visual) device you use every day (both in hardware design, and software such as the design of lossy compression algorithms). We have very precise scientific understanding of the limits (and individual variation) of human visual and (to a slightly lesser extent) auditory perception and preferences.