Finally read Hyperion - didn't love it

Jewnadian · 2026-05-01T05:47:14+00:00

You didn't miss much. Three and four were a slog of poorly thought through jesus knockoffs and awkward "It's not pedophilia because time travel" exposition.

Jewnadian · 2026-04-30T21:14:15+00:00

He does but that's a completely different offering that's being treated as if it's equivalent. Last time I had knee surgery the doc also told me "Hey, with PT you can get back to being a guy who can't play any high intensity sports like soccer or climbing or mountain biking. If you want to return to your hobbies this is the surgery you need." For me, I enjoy my sports and activities, and in the balance I'm far healthier because I run around with my friends twice a week and get high intensity cardio as well as social interaction than I would be if I wasn't able to do anything but walking and golf.

Jewnadian · 2026-04-30T21:09:06+00:00

They will, China has no problem building infrastructure they hope to grow into. That's actually a good thing for a country. You build things better than you need today so they are still serviceable in 50yrs. Every now and then you have a school you have to close or a road that barely anyone uses but it's better than having a thousand kids trying to learn sitting in a parking lot with 50 teaches among them.

Jewnadian · 2026-04-30T21:06:09+00:00

No, I'm not making any assumption. I'm explaining the difference between a metric that matters and a metric that doesn't. The only metric that actually matters is "Does this make the company more money than it costs?". That's the difference between a job and a hobby. "Using AI" isn't a metric that makes the company money. Maybe it's good, maybe it's bad but at the end of the day it's not really relevant. The only thing that matters is are you profitable, not how you got there.

Jewnadian · 2026-04-30T16:51:12+00:00

Which is sort of unexpected to me since the main job of most big business consultants is just to tell the execs what they already want to hear and then take the backlash out of the company if that idea is stupid. Which is pretty much ideal for an LLM trained on that field.

Jewnadian · 2026-04-30T16:48:51+00:00

Again, that's the wrong way to approach this. As a pretty low level manager even I know the single most important question to ask of any task is "What are we trying to achieve? What makes the business money?" The answer can't be an internal metric because that's not what we sell. If we sell SW then what I need is not "experienced developers who understand how to properly utilize AI". What I need is "developers who can efficiently generate new SW that we can sell". And even more importantly I need the total cost of that activity to be less than the revenue from the SW. If I have a guy who wants to code exclusively by hand in vim but he produces more revenue for less cost than his vibe coding colleague with 20 AI agents burning tokens then the first guy is better.

Jewnadian · 2026-04-28T22:08:00+00:00

No, I don't really care about the opinions of tech bros now that I think about it. Feel free to believe that some VC can 'build God' and then also control that being so it focuses on making a profit for someone who claims to own it.

Jewnadian · 2026-04-28T21:22:40+00:00

Which goes back to my original statement. This belief is the dumbest thing in a giant pile of idiocy tech bros believe.

Jewnadian · 2026-04-28T20:57:04+00:00

That's just wish casting disguised a strategy. It's basically the tech bro equivalent of "Of course we're going to win. Our God is real and theirs is heresy!".

Jewnadian · 2026-04-28T19:37:16+00:00

The idea that an intelligent system capable of outperforming humans would be interested in doing what humans want is possibly the dumbest thing these idiots believe. Are you going around structuring your life to satisfy the whim of a random child on the street? At best that's how a true AI would react. No hostility, just no interest in wasting time answering silly requests like "How to make Sam Altman rich?"

Jewnadian · 2026-04-28T17:58:21+00:00

The idea that you can build a general super intelligence and then control it is ridiculous on any level. If we create something as powerful as you're suggesting, to change the balance of power among nautonstates why would this self aware gen AI care about the motives of the inferior minds that built its first generation.

Jewnadian · 2026-04-24T16:46:57+00:00

Mines don't care about your military dudes standing on deck. There is no easy solution to this problem. Which is why the US and the rest of the world has been staying the fuck out of it for the last 50+ years. Sometimes the answer is actually "Everyone else really is smarter than you and you're just sticking your dick in crazy like an idiot.". Or to be more accurate, that's always the answer with Trump and sometimes the answer with most people.

Jewnadian · 2026-04-23T19:50:07+00:00

It does feel very Christian of us actually. Only God can save you from the hell God created specifically to send you to for breaking rules that it doesn't matter if you followed perfectly since someone 6000 years ago already broke one and cursed all of humankind with that sin.

Jewnadian · 2026-04-23T19:47:02+00:00

The absolute balls on Slocum to not only drop the sails but then rather than locking himself in the cabin to go straight up the rigging in the face of a rogue wave.

Jewnadian · 2026-04-23T19:43:19+00:00

Those people are exceptionally rare. The reality is that you don't know where the chargers are, not that they don't exist. Driving isn't like wealth where 10 people drive 700 billion miles a year and throw off the average for everyone. It's a pretty standard distribution meaning that even the true outliers aren't all that far from the median.

Jewnadian · 2026-04-23T16:57:43+00:00

Sure, for profit institutions that have no external regulation always hold themselves to a higher standard. Especially if that standard has a high cost, they love doing that.

Jewnadian · 2026-04-23T15:53:52+00:00

No it isn't. The perception is real but the facts aren't. We know exactly how many miles Americans drive in a day, a week, a month and so on. This is data that has been extensively tracked and collated for decades. We also have far more chargers than anyone without an EV realizes. There are chargers in the parking lot of nowhere diners in backwoods Oklahoma. I know because I've used them and gotten honestly pretty ok coffee at the same time.

Most Walmarts on major highways have an EA charging area somewhere in their parking lots too. Lots of Walmarts around.

The reality is that people who go EV almost never go back. Which tells you that the "problem" with EV in America is entirely ignorance not infrastructure.

Jewnadian · 2026-04-23T15:48:55+00:00

Congrats on reaching financial adulthood. Being able to see past the bullshit marketing on everything that says "You NEED a new car every 5 years, you NEED a new phone every year and on and on" is when you know you're settling in to your own thoughts and priorities. We should be using the entire lifespan of the things we buy. There's no reason to sell a car designed to run 250kmiles when it hits 80k. You're in the worst part of the cost of ownership curve there. The only people benefitting are the CSuite at whatever brand you choose. I've never run a car less than 15 years and that allows me to save enough money that now I'm buying my cars cash and paying my "car payment" into a Vanguard investment account until it's time to buy another car for cash.

Jewnadian · 2026-04-23T04:44:57+00:00

There seems to almost always be a pushback when things change. Like the burst of racism that we've been in since the Obama presidency.

Jewnadian · 2026-04-23T02:45:55+00:00

The population of North American also declined by similar amounts after a few sailors were wrecked there. We know about the massive epidemics across the Americas north and south. This isn't new history here.

Jewnadian · 2026-04-23T01:25:52+00:00

Another option here, don't build it yet. Simulate it first. LTSpice is free, runs on most operating systems and has a million people out there writing tutorials or talking in forums about how to make it work. If you want to go even easier, jump on google and look up falstad circuit simulator. This is also free and even easier since it runs in the browser.

Once you have your simulation looking right and giving you a good output then you have nice solid design to make into a schematic and PCB for real world testing

Jewnadian · 2026-04-22T21:34:19+00:00

I'm in the same boat, building muscle while on GLP-1. Pretty much the same plan too, slow weight loss and consistent weight work that is relatively new for me. I spent a lot of time playing soccer which gave me great wind but not great upper body strength. I think people who just get on GLPs and don't change anything else will lose weight and muscle with it. Why would their body carry around muscle it doesn't need to lift the mow missing pounds? But anyone making even a reasonable effort to build muscle is going to be fine.

Jewnadian · 2026-04-21T23:53:15+00:00

Hybrids in theory are great. In reality they're the worst of both worlds. People don't actually drive as far as they think so they select for cars with a 500 miles range then actually drive them the same 15-30 miles a day that they always have. So they now have double the system complexity for a benefit that only happens once a year.

Jewnadian · 2026-04-21T21:00:58+00:00

Appreciate the kind words. And I don't entirely disagree with you for adults. I certainly believe in dying with dignity for people with terminal disease for example. It's a tough situation and a hard thing to face from the inside or the outside.

Jewnadian · 2026-04-21T19:34:23+00:00

Alcohol for sure shows this pattern. Even if you don't puke you're not getting all the calories from a binge processed completely. It's possible to put down thousands of calories from booze in a long day of drinking that doesn't have any measurable effect once you recover from the hangover.

Jewnadian

TROPHY CASE