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The ICE stuff is extremely unpopular. Most of the people who voted for it did not understand they were doing so. If "the US" is the people, then no, they mostly do not want this. If "the US" is Trump, then yes, it is.

This is also the most important political question in the US right now. Are the people still sovereign?

The Silmarillion is riveting and concise! I will grant that it's not a novel.

I looked at applying there way back in 2020 and bounced off the application because it seemed like more work than I had time for.

oh you mean the thing where I randomly have to press 0 to get back to the normal interface?

And yet somehow it never predicts, "Wait, back up, three turns ago I said we wanted to do X. You did Y which is the opposite of X," which I write pretty frequently!

Or "I have emphasized repeatedly that you're not to touch vcs and only work in the designated worktree, which you've written down in your memory at least 37 times."

nitpick: I was fully engaged with this article until I hit

> And a bonus point: you skim. Did you notice number 5?

Then I bounced. The best readers skim aggressively. Most text is not worth reading. You skim to identify what is.

But moreover, reading != proofreading. I read every one of the bullets! I did not pay attention to the numbering scheme, because it conveys no meaning. It's a structural affordance for referring to the text, not part of its content.

Alternatively, things that are not insightful can feel insightful to some people, because they triggered some different, tangentially related thoughts than what was being communicated — i.e., the reader substituted their own insight for the author's.

Or because the author has enough authority that they are granted a presumption of insightfulness by default, even (or perhaps especially) when the concrete insight that's allegedly being communicated remains unclear.

It really is important to understand the failure modes that the durability model accounts for and what it doesn't. It only accounts for "normal" failures, like an HDD reaching end of life.

For example, you mention Backblaze. Backblaze has public posts about their durability model. They claim to use 17:20 Reed-Solomon erasure encoding. That means there are 20 shards of a blob, and you can lose 3 of them and still reconstruct the blob.

Think about that for a second. If they store 4 shards in a datacenter, that means that a loss of that one datacenter is sufficient to lose the blob, forever. That entails that blobs are sharded across a minimum of 7 data centers, or the loss of one data center might mean permanent data loss. Which one do you think is true? (In fact it's pretty clear from Backblaze's public posts that they don't shard across data centers at all, only across racks within a data center.)

Now, AWS's availability guarantee — not their durability guarantee — entails that they use a less cost-effective erasure coding ratio. S3 is designed so that your blob is available even if a whole AZ goes down, and it's well known that most AWS regions have only 3 AZs. Therefore, if you tolerate the same number of shards lost to HDD failure as Backblaze in your durability model (3), then you might need 17:30 erasure coding to get the same durability and the required availability. That means S3 is storing way more physical bytes than Backblaze — 1.76x the logical size of the blob, instead of Backblaze's 1.18x. That's more expensive, but it also gives you better availability.

Which is also why One Zone S3 is cheaper — if you don't care about the availability guarantee, S3 can do what Backblaze does and save 33% on physical bytes, and they pass on 40–50% of those savings to the customer (this is fairer than it sounds — there's more overhead than physical storage bytes).

But here's the thing. AWS has more redundancy built in than Backblaze because they make availability guarantees in addition to durability guarantees. BUT the durability model is the same, which is why Backblaze can claim equivalent durability to S3. S3 in fact has better durability — they can survive the permanent loss of an AZ without necessarily losing blobs stored there (with the exception of One Zone blobs), and Backblaze cannot. But that's not actually a factor of the durability model, which is just taking into account normal events like HDD failure. Instead, S3 has durability that's more resilient to AZ loss because of their availability model. It's a side effect that isn't actually part of the durability promise!

Aristotle thought some fish were spontaneously generated and others not (also all eels and Testacea).

"This occurs in ponds, especially one near Knidos, which, so it is said, on one occasion dried up at the time of the Dogstar and all the mud was taken out; water began to collect in it as the first <rains> came, and at that point tiny fishes appeared, as soon as the water began. This fish was a kind of grey mullet which is not produced as the result of copulation, and its size was about that of a small sprat: none of them had either egg or milt. (...) This evidence shows that certain fishes are produced spontaneously, and do not come out of eggs or from copulation" (HA VI.15 569a13-19, 25-26).

This is something of a problem for Aristotle, since the formal cause appears to be absent in spontaneous generation. He likely would have been happier to discover that spontaneous generation does not, in fact, occur for animals. But he felt that the evidence forced him to concede that it does.

> On the topic of Michael's comment, I think it's easy for programmers to not notice ads. Almost all programmers I know use an ad blocker and, in real life, their eyes seem to just skim over ads and not notice them.

How do you write this article and not notice that this should be the topmost example of people adapting to buggy software that doesn't at all work for its users without workaround cognitive hacks?

The title of the article is misleading -- they're pretty clearly talking about philosophy PhDs here.

The implicit assumption is that these AI-company jobs were recently created and indicate the start of a trend.

Chalmers is stating that there's more demand for philosophers with the right sort of training to work at AI companies (whatever that is) than there are philosophers with that training. (I don't really believe this, but that's what he says.)

He's making this claim for two reasons: (1) to respond to the argument (not directly stated in the article, but quite commonly understood to be sound in the profession field) that it's unwise to get a PhD in philosophy because there are not enough jobs and (2) to suggest that if you do want to get a PhD in philosophy and use it professionally, you'd be wise to study with Chalmers at NYU in order to get placed into these tech-industry jobs.

What you're missing is that this is approximately at least a half-dozen more jobs than open tenure-track positions at research universities.