qez

If you find yourself explaining the intricacies of CNN algorithms in your suicide note, consider that you are too "dug into" a bespoke topic. In 2 years, none of these math problems would be his mind at all.

I wonder, are there an infinite number of proofs of the theorem, each more complex than the last? Can I rephrase what they did, make it more convoluted, and call it a new proof?

Whoever wrote this piece is a bad communicator who thinks he's a good communicator, and then goes through life getting confused about why no one understands him.

For example, in the story about the Japanese, he assumes some context from the reader: "What are they building? What is Fujitsu and what is Habitat and why does Japan need their own special version of it?" It's not even clear they're building anything technical, so I wondered, "Why do they need a client and server? And also, didn't you ever think to check their internal technical details before? What did you think would be the result?"

> “who’s going to pay to make all those links?” or “why would anyone want to put documents online?”

These are good questions and you better have a well-worded answer! In fact, it is easy to answer these if you have prepared for them. Did you just assume that the potential customer would already have familiar with the technicals of your product? If that was the case, they would have bought it from someone else already. Your target demo is the uninformed.

This post claims that the answer to "why white" is because of the beneficial effects it has on the disposition of the writer. But that's hardly a reason to write, that's just a helpful side effect. The reason to write is that you have something to say, and you want others to hear it.

As someone without a lot of math background, the most confusing part of this is k. Is k a number, like 7.45 or whatever? Or something else? Everything else is just normal mathy stuff.

> So then you need users. Elon has 115 million followers on Twitter. He'd get users no matter what he built, so he's solved that problem too

No. He got that number of followers because he is on Twitter. He would not get the same number of followers on some other social media platoform. Trump had 20 times as many followers on Twitter than he has on Truth Social. And those Truth Social users are less valuable.

Engineers like to think that the engineering is the important part of platforms. It's not. The engineering can be easily replicated. The valuable part of platforms is the users. You buy the platforms to buy the users.

> Some of them, like Dolphins, sure seem damned close to our own capabilities with likely fully formed languages ... Because we're definitely trying to communicate with the species we're aware of that we think have language.

This is highly doubtful. Crows don't have language anything like humans. Dolphins are a more likely candidate. I want to believe it, but I can't.

> But as for "could"? Shit you can do that at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta

Yes, these are some of the highest paying companies on the planet. Your statement is not a put-down of Jane Street.

> anymore than there is a clear winner between tabs and spaces.

But there is a clear winner here. Tabs won, almost all code files use spaces. Of course everyone uses the tab key on their keyboard, and the IDE makes spaces for you; no one is going to manually press space 4 times.

I don't think solar energy is the only type of energy. And if you are at "we are running out of square meters of land to put solar panels on", space might actually be viable at that level of advancement.

Food is not limited by labor, or specifically scarce any more than any other good. In fact it's not obvious to me it will always require labor at all.

Strictly speaking, all goods are scarce if you don't have an infinite number of them. But I think we are lazily saying "scarce" when we mean something like "unavoidably zero sum". The only thing you list which has that is land.

No that's their point. We could provide for everyone but we do not. I disagree with that like you might, but you're missing the point.

> Not being able to send things into space is not scarcity.

Strictly speaking, this is false.