jgraham

I don't really know anyone serious who thinks that ecological systems have a single stable equilibrium state.

Indeed, even the trivial systems you learn about at school, like predator-prey relationships are dynamic equilibria rather than static ones. Experiments clearly demonstrate trophic cascades can shift ecological systems from one meta-stable state to another (e.g. remove crabs from a rockpool, and the herbivore population explodes until it runs out of seaweed, at which point it crashes).

Evolution is obviously a progression between many quasi-stable states.

I think a stronger claim is that _economics_ doesn't recognise this; local incentives and the price feedback structure aren't enough to avoid pushing natural systems out of their current quasi-equilibria state into degraded states that are long-term also poorer for humans (e.g. collapsing fish populations). This is also pretty broadly understood, and why market interventions like fishing quotas exist. But in the conflict between "extract more more now" and "long term health of the ecosystem", "extract more now" is the economic default and "long term health" requires special pleading, so unsurprisingly the former tends to win.

Thanks.

The conclusions there seem to be roughly:

* Keep calm and carry on, because we don't have any better ideas

* Sometimes it's OK to eat the damn marshmallow (i.e. in the face of future uncertainty, remember to do things that make your kids happy today)

I kind of suspect that the first one in particular is more or less people's default response. But I also wonder about what changes people _have_ made, if any.

I tried asking this before on here, and didn't really get many useful replies (and I guess I won't again now the algorithm has decided this post has too many comments and not enough upvotes, or whatever it is that's caused it to sink off the front page), but I'm honestly interested in what people here with (school age) children are telling their kids about the future, and what that looks like in terms of decisions around education, careers etc.

This isn't because I think that having children gives people any extra insights, but because it's pretty hard to think of other situations in which people have to plan for the happiness of others they care about over a timescale of decades and where there's significantly more ability to change course than for many adults (kids tend not to have short-term financial commitments that lock them into existing career decisions, for example).

Historically I think a lot of people in tech would have recommended it as a good career (whilst at the same time, reputedly, the people who made generational wealth out of tech were arranging their children's lives to minimise exposure to the products that made them rich). Is that still what people are saying?

Server side image maps predate javascript. They were in early versions of Mosaic.

Client side image maps and the script element were (AFAICT) both introduced in Netscape 2.

Even when scripting was introduced, you didn't necessarily have the ability to move elements around freely on the page. I think (but I'm not certain) that it wasn't until Netscape 4 era that you had enough layout primitives to implement the multi-layer positioning approach to custom clickable areas.

This seems like a much more interesting question to me.

Telling other people's children what to do is easy and basically doesn't have any downside to being wrong. With your own children things are a bit different.

So: what are people here with school age children telling their own kids about the future? If their kids ask, what kind of careers would they encourage them to pursue, assuming they have the skills and interest?

When I was last in the Bay Area, maybe about a decade ago the bookshops were full of titles like "Python for Preschoolers" (I exaggerate, but only slightly). Clearly at the time a lot of people working in tech thought that cultivating an interest in programming was going to be the path to being a successful (by some metric) adult. Is that still the case?

I also went to a couple of his (fantastic) undergraduate courses, and have a huge amount of respect for him.

That said, I think it's worth mentioning that Climate Change Without the Hot Air has aged pretty badly, and I'd be reluctant to recommend it to people who don't already have the background to understand what's aged well and what hasn't.

The high level approach of making high level numerical estimates makes sense, but it dismisses solar energy in about a page due to assumed high costs. It turns out that even if you're David Mackay you can still be caught out by exponentials :) I notice now that the version you link has some inline updates pointing out how off the assumptions in this section were, but it seems to me that's not enough; you probably need to redo the entire analysis based on what we know today rather than trying to make purely local adjustments.

On the other hand the point at biofuels are even more inefficient, and therefore a dead end even before you consider broader environmental impacts, are well made and something that is sadly not yet widely reflected in policy.

> However natural ice cream can be, it's still a buttload of fats and sugars

My default base for homemade ice cream is a custard with 50g sugar for 6 egg yolks and 500g of milk/cream.

I'm not claiming it's a health food, but in terms of pure sugar content homemade ice cream is pretty low compared to most other things you might make as dessert.

Sorbet is very different; that is usually something close to a 1:1 ratio of sugar and water.

It's not that writing _is_ thinking, but (effective) writing _requires_ thinking. It forces you to take a collection of lose and incoherent thoughts and reify them into an argument that can hold its own weight.

I think if prediction 1 is true (that it becomes cheap to clone existing software in a way that doesn't violate copyright law), the response will not be purely technical (moving to thin clients, or otherwise trying to technically restrict the access surface to make reverse engineering harder). Instead I'd predict that companies look to the law to replace the protections that they previously got from copyright.

Obvious possibilities include:

* More use of software patents, since these apply to underlying ideas, rather than specific implementations.

* Stronger DMCA-like laws which prohibit breaking technical provisions designed to prevent reverse engineering.

Similarly, if the people predicting that humans are going to be required to take ultimate responsibility for the behaviour of software are correct, then it clearly won't be possible for that to be any random human. Instead you'll need legally recognised credentials to be allowed to ship software, similar to the way that doctors or engineers work today.

Of course these specific predictions might be wrong. I think it's fair to say that nobody really knows what might have changed in a year, or where the technical capabilities will end up. But I see a lot of discussions and opinions that assume zero feedback from the broader social context in which the tech exists, which seems like they're likely missing a big part of the picture.

Power in general.

Your time-average power budget for things that run on phones is about 0.5W (batteries are about 10Wh and should last at least a day). That's about three orders of magnitude lower than a the GPUs running in datacenters.

Even if battery technology improves you can't have a phone running hot, so there are strong physical limits on the total power budget.

More or less the same applies to laptops, although there you get maybe an additional order of magnitude.