Recent submissions

Comment · 4 months ago
For the cost of sending one human there for a week, we could send thousands of robots there for years.

There is no way that human space exploration is ever cost effective with robot space exploration.

Comment · 5 months ago
Why is the path curved at the start?
Comment · 5 months ago
Mismanaged monoculture forests are one of the first examples of states seeking simplified legible solutions to managing complex ecosystems in Seeing Like a State.
Comment · 6 months ago
It hasn't happened in this case. Your example has causality reversed. Khamenei wasn't killed because there was a prediction market about the political leadership of Iran.
Comment · 6 months ago
>there can be no interstate market in a substance that is illegal to trade.

There is in fact an interstate market in many substances that are illegal to trade because laws against things do not make those things fail to exist.

Comment · 6 months ago
Or he cares more about promulgating the philosophy of cryptoanarchism than he does about his personal enrichment or safety.

Most attempts to analyze what Satoshi would do suffer from a serious theory of mind blindspot. Just a failure to imagine someone who's motivated by significantly different things than the average person. It's the same failure as when people marvel at billionaire CEOs who continue to work despite having more than enough money to satisfy their every material whim.

Yes, if I were Satoshi or Bezos I'd have fucked off to a private island long ago. But they're not like me.

Comment · 6 months ago
The thing is, most of the people heavily involved in early Bitcoin are fairly characterized as cryptoanarchists, a group strongly devoted to the principle of privacy and liberty effected through technological means.

The refusal to provide personal communications metadata by such a person is evidence of nothing but their steadfast commitment to the philosophy that presented them with the opportunity to be part of those email conversations in the first place.

Comment · 9 months ago
>Because agentic AI can parse unstructured data and make purchasing decisions regardless of whether your site allows it, which avoids the chicken-and-egg problem.

People can do that too, and also benefit from actual structured data. But the avoidance of the chicken and egg problem didn't seem to result in widespread structured data stores beating out the SEO-spam-style listings.

Comment · 9 months ago
>The marketplace that builds "agent-friendly" commerce (verified listings, structured data, transparent pricing, API access) becomes the default backend for AI shopping.

I'd like to believe this, but claims like this have been made since the early days of internet commerce. After all, it's not hard to specify structured data about items and run queries against it. But it largely has not materialized outside of a few special suppliers.

You can't actually search Amazon or eBay or Wayfair for things with specified dimensions or characteristics. You can, however, find lots of listings for things like "Gzsbaby 6 Piece Jumbo Dinosaur Toys for Kids 3-5 and Toddlers, Large Soft Dinosaur Toys for Lovers - Perfect Party Favors, Birthday Gifts "

Perhaps this time is different? But why is it different? What economic incentives will lead to good structured data and transparent pricing, rather than whatever the AI equivalent of glurge/slop listings is?

Comment · 10 months ago
That's 4 ounces of beef, not meat. I eat plenty of meat, but eat beef less than once a week.
Comment · 11 months ago
This kind of phrasing has been common in writing long before AI. There's a reason that AI picked it up—it's a natural human written speech pattern.
Comment · 11 months ago
Comment · 11 months ago
Rigid whiskers have other sets of problems. Below someone mentioned that rigid whiskers will break when they contact objects. If the whisker is as rigid as the drone itself, it plausibly breaks the same cables that the drone breaks. You also have the problem that in the event of drone failure, you now have a spike-covered drone falling out of the sky. What kind of damage does a bamboo chopstick or thin piece of steel do when it hits someone or something at ground level at drone-falling velocity with the mass of a drone behind it?

It's quite possible that these problems are solvable and can be engineered around, that there's a whisker-based solution, but I don't see it. It's certainly not an obviously workable solution.

Comment · 11 months ago
Thin lightweight whiskers are going to be challenging to manage on a propeller-driven vehicle. They'll get blown all over the place. Having them extend out past the propellers will likely get them tangled in the propellers.
Comment · 11 months ago
Honestly, my experience with Siri is that it works worse than it did 10 years ago. It's not clear to me if that's with Siri itself or just the general decrease in quality of Apple software over the past N years, but zero changes would have been an improvement.

Things that seemed to work reliably for me 10 years ago but now do not:

1. "Call mom". Siri has apparently forgotten who my mother is. I tried "Hey Siri <name> is my mother" and I got an error. I'm sure it's resolvable but come on.

2. "Directions to <destination>" This always used to fail when it couldn't find places, but lately, when I'm driving, Siri will respond "Getting directions to <destination>" and then... nothing. No directions come up. I have to do it 2-3 times to have the directions actually start.

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