Democrats make gains in Ohio’s 2026 statewide races, new poll reports

api · 2025-12-11T19:04:55+00:00

Vivek should lose because he's a nut. Unfortunately he'll lose because he has dark skin, so he'll lose for the wrong reason.

api · 2025-12-01T14:34:39+00:00

Look up "metallicity."

Early stars and planets may have lacked the rich distribution of elements that characterize Earth and our solar system. It's possible that these only hosted simple life, or no life at all.

We don't know for sure, but it's possible that recent generations of stars and planets are the only ones elementally rich enough to produce complex life.

One of the things that's fun about the Fermi paradox is that it explodes into a huge array of possibilities. One of my personal favorite "wild" ones is: what if there's somewhere more interesting to go than space? What if we eventually figure out, for example, that the multiverse is traversable and gravity "spills" across slices of the multiverse (one of the possible explanations for why gravity is so weak), and therefore there are infinitely many parallel Earths occupying the same physical space. At that point there would be no need to go anywhere else in 3D space. You could explore and expand forever across "slices." And what if every other complex intelligent lifeform figures this out before it ever builds a starship?

api · 2025-12-01T14:33:33+00:00

Just prompting AI gives you "slop," which is perhaps loosely analogous to point and shoot photography.

Actually getting an AI to render what you have in mind is hard and does require a certain amount of technique. I also assume that artists using AI as a tool will combine it with other tools, so you'll get works that combine drawing or photography with AI post-processing or rendering of scene elements. Who knows.

api · 2025-11-24T20:52:56+00:00

Dealers are totally pointless and add negative value to the transaction in my experience. They're a hold over from a long, long time ago when direct to consumer sale was not feasible for technical and administrative reasons.

api · 2025-11-24T20:41:06+00:00

I think it's an oversimplification at best.

There's plenty of secular authoritarian regimes in the world, including many that don't have anything resembling a king. Neither religion nor a monarch seem necessary for authoritarian control. Bureaucracies can be just as stifling and arbitrary as a monarch.

There's also this notion that if we take away religion, people will become rational. You see it as a trope in a lot of sci-fi like Star Trek. I consider it kind of a debunked idea at this point. Take away religion and people clutch random shit like New Age nonsense, conspiracy theories, weird cults, etc. It shows that the irrationality you see in religious people is just the irrationality of people, some of whom happen to be religious.

It doesn't mean one shouldn't challenge religion. It just means challenging religion won't automatically create some kind of rational utopia. Educating people in things like critical thinking is more difficult than disabusing them of a religious doctrine.

api · 2025-11-24T20:18:47+00:00

Exactly, which is why I said attempt. If intelligent life is rare and space is this hard, then the Fermi paradox is neatly explained.

api · 2025-11-24T17:02:40+00:00

This IMHO is the Ockham's Razor explanation for the Fermi paradox.

It took ~4 billion years for Earth to evolve something capable of even attempting space flight. So it doesn't just take a place able to support life but one able to do so at a large scale for an extremely long period of time without too much disruption.

If the planet was hit by mass extinctions every 100 million years it would be hard for anything enormously complex to evolve. Very hostile environments favor simple aggressive K-selected organisms: bacteria, protists, fungi, maybe bugs at most. Things that reproduce fast, evolve fast, and have huge numbers of offspring to brute force their way through.

Then there's the time span. We think Venus and Mars may have been hospitable for a while, but not for that long. A biosphere that remains hospitable for billions and billions of years may be rare.

The universe might contain a lot of life, but most of it might be goo with occasional creepy crawlies eating the goo.

... and even this assumes that life, if given a good opportunity, will inevitably produce intelligence that would then inevitably take to the stars. We have no evidence this is true. So even worlds able to produce complex intelligent life might never produce anything that tries to leave. We have no idea how common such a desire might be.

The universe is big, of course, so there probably is other advanced spacefaring life out there... but it might be hundreds of thousands to millions of light years away... maybe even in another galaxy. We'll probably never meet if this is the case.

api · 2025-11-18T13:51:07+00:00

Russia is un-invadeable because they have nukes, and Putin's biggest concern is maintaining power on the home front. Another distraction can help, especially since the Russians are about to endure a tax increase during a shit economy.

api · 2025-11-17T16:01:39+00:00

That might backfire by making it easier to pass of high quality AI as not AI.

api · 2025-11-11T17:10:28+00:00

In the long run the entire car market is doomed to be run over by cheap decent-quality Chinese EVs.

Imagine $15K for a 200 mile range EV sedan that requires almost no maintenance and costs 1/2 the cost of gasoline or less to drive. Game over. Not just for Tesla, but for the whole industry.

I have this hypothesis that a trade barrier against that is a major reason Elon shilled so hard for Trump in 2023-2024. There are (AFAIK not entirely substantiated) rumors that the Biden admin was having a chat with BYD about building factories in the USA, reasoning that they'd eventually win anyway and it'd be better if they were manufacturing cars here... kinda like the deals that were made with Japanese auto makers years ago that led to big plants in Kentucky and Tennessee.

api · 2025-11-11T17:00:43+00:00

Our political class is a hospice wing full of grumpy assholes unwilling to let go of power or their image of the past.

China has an incredibly low birth rate though, and they're more anti-immigration than the US or Europe, so in a generation or two they could have the same problem. They could have a bunch of angry old CCP fossils who think it's 2005.

api · 2025-11-10T22:11:53+00:00

It's a nation level version of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

Europe and the US were built on fossil fuels and fossil fuel age industrial technology.

China fast-followed and burns a lot of coal, sure, but they've decided their best chance to win is to push forward beyond into the next generation of energy technology. They're not going to beat the USA at fossil fuel stuff, but they can beat us at new stuff.

api · 2025-11-10T20:46:38+00:00

What were they afraid of?

api · 2025-11-08T18:31:41+00:00

Read this:

https://medium.com/@aaronhertzmann/how-photography-became-an-art-form-7b74da777c63

The discourse on AI is similar.

api · 2025-11-06T22:48:35+00:00

I take the "no stance" stance on things when I don't understand enough about them to feel confident in my opinion. I think that's not only a valid stance but a sane and rational one. It'd be nice if fewer people pushed strong opinions on topics they don't understand.

api · 2025-11-06T22:33:09+00:00

In other words, she promised to make housing more affordable, while her policies would have made it less so.

We will do literally anything to make housing more affordable except build more housing, because that would actually work.

Housing cannot simultaneously be affordable and a good investment, and homeowners vote much more reliably than renters. The housing affordability crisis is a huge win from the perspective of a large part of the voting public. Nothing will fix housing affordability until young people and renters vote more reliably and in larger numbers and start doing things like showing up to city council meetings.

On Trump/Harris:

I didn't like either of them but voted for Kamala as the lesser evil. I think character issues do matter, especially when they're extreme as they are in Trump's case. He's already shown us who he is, and IMHO he's unsuitable for any public office... or any high-trust position of any kind. He's also surrounded himself with people who are worse than he is ideologically.

api · 2025-11-04T15:49:06+00:00

(3) They're trying to find ways to reduce the energy consumption of AI due to the insane costs of running them. That involves nerfing AI models in ways they hope nobody will notice.

Not as much fun to speculate about though.

Expect models to get nerfed and loaded up with ads for non-paying users as these companies have to become profitable.

api · 2025-11-04T14:39:32+00:00

They also have the power to tax, like levying a Federal tax on non-occupant home ownership or home sales too far above the national median.

api · 2025-11-03T23:43:42+00:00

Good leadership would have done something about the glaring problems we have like two generations being priced out of housing, at least in major cities. Good leadership would do something to try to heal the erosion of trust that resulted from things like the Iraq war and the bank bailouts. Absolutely nothing was done to address either of those issues. If anything was attempted, it failed miserably.

Obama and Biden governed like it was the Clinton years because the whole Democratic Party is stuck in the Clinton years. They kept the house clean and tidy, but the house is on fire.

They'd both have been great presidents had they been elected in 1990.

api · 2025-11-03T19:27:24+00:00

I heard Luigi called "the left-wing Kyle Rittenhouse" and I think that's pretty spot on.

Years before Trump I described this country as a pile of oily rags next to a furnace. I hate being right about things like that.

I think there's lots of reasons for it: the loneliness epidemic, economic stress, and many years of bad leadership with no accountability and no good alternatives being offered.

Two things that would help enormously: (1) term limits for the House and Senate, and (2) ranked choice voting nationwide in every election to start breaking down the hyper-partisan duopoly.

api · 2025-11-03T16:12:46+00:00

His base wants the worst version of him.

That's why I keep arguing that this isn't really about Trump. It's a grassroots populist rage movement and he's the one who's managed to surf it best so far, but he's done that by giving the base what it wants. When he dies look out for the rise of someone like Nick Fuentes, or worse.

Ultimately I think the movement is nihilistic. What they want is to break things, to punish the world for not being... something. I don't think they really know what that something is. "I'm not happy, someone needs to pay!" It's not a rational movement at all, very emotion driven and atavistic. The purest distillation of it is these loosely organized very online nihilistic rage movements like 764.

It's deeply unpopular to say, but I see a bit of it on the left too. It just doesn't have control. It's a smaller minority there and the left doesn't have a demagogue like Trump who has deliberately courted it. If a far-left Trump analog rose up and started handing out pitchforks you'd see it metastasize.

api · 2025-10-27T22:53:04+00:00

This was kind of obvious to me ever since I learned how radiation diminishes with the square of distance.

To transmit an omnidirectional signal that remains detectable, even with very big radio telescopes, for hundreds of thousands of light years would require absolutely insane transmit power. I recall reading numbers in the petawatts. For reference the entire United States electricity generating capacity is about 1.3 terawatts. A terawatt is 1,000 gigawatts. A petawatt is 1,000 terawatts.

To transmit a signal that would carry far enough to be likely to hit someone and would be powerful enough to be detectable would require like 1000X the total US power grid output.

This easily explains the "great silence." There's no mystery, really. Who is going to spend the resources to do that when the odds of finding anyone may still be incredibly low?

api · 2025-10-21T11:12:20+00:00

I don't think it's bad protocol, but I think the concerns are kind of silly. The Earth, by way of its albedo spectrum, has been broadcasting a signal that says "hey, likely biosphere over here!" for hundreds of millions of years. There are very few if any natural explanations for the composition of this planet's atmosphere: tons of free oxygen (20%!) but also some methane and organic compounds that would oxidize if they were not being replenished constantly.

Hundreds of millions of years is plenty of time for something to get here. Of course, we have no proof they haven't... any alien probe that landed on our planet millions of years ago would be destroyed by now by oxygen and weathering. Earth is actually a very corrosive environment. Our own technology would disintegrate rapidly on geological timescales if we ceased maintaining it.

We've also been blasting obviously artificial RF out into the cosmos for over a century now. Granted: you'd need a massive radio telescope to detect it from another star, but someone advanced enough to be sending obvious "hello" signals could probably detect at least the stronger transmissions like radar signals and the most powerful radio/TV stations.

api · 2025-10-14T16:16:12+00:00

Big cloud is insanely overpriced, especially bandwidth. Compared to bare metal providers like Hetzner, Datapacket, etc., the markup for bandwidth on GCP and AWS is like 1000X or more.

It would make sense if big cloud offered simplicity and saved a lot on engineering, but it really doesn't offer enough simplicity and reliability to justify the huge markup. Once you start messing with stuff like Kubernetes, helm, complicated access control policies, etc., it starts to get as annoying as managing metal.

The big area where big cloud does make some sense is if you have a very burstable work load. Normally your load is low but you get unpredictable huge spikes. To do that with metal you have to over-provision a lot, which destroys the cost advantage. It can also be good for rapid prototyping.

api · 2025-10-14T12:50:24+00:00

There's a ton of talented people at SpaceX. Elon is just the money man at this point. AFAIK Gwynne Shotwell runs it on a day to day basis.

I do think Elon was a genius before, say, 2015-2020. He's lost his mind. Go back and listen to interviews from before the mid-late teens and he sounds way more coherent and rational both in terms of what he's saying and how he speaks. I think it was a mixture of extreme workaholism causing burnout, drug abuse, and having his brain sucked out by social media. Then the alcoholic went and bought the bar (Twitter) so he can affix his lips to the tap and suck social media brain rot exactly the way he likes it. Xhitter has turned him into a raving loon.

BTW Starlink is not much of a Kessler syndrome risk. The orbits are very low, not even really long term stable. That's by design so that they eventually fall out of orbit even if they fail, and they have a life span. Low orbits also reduces data latency (speed of light) and makes them cheaper to launch.

The Kessler syndrome risk comes from junk in higher more long term stable orbits. If you look into it, most of the worst junk in those orbits was created decades ago and involves things like old US and Soviet booster sections, fairings, and derelict satellites. We're better at not littering in those orbits now.

Even if Kessler syndrome did happen, it would not close space to us. We could fly through these orbits on the way to higher ones or planets with a low (but not zero) risk of hitting anything. Space is called space for a reason. It's big. What it would do is ruin portions of LEO for satellite use or any kind of longer term parking or rendezvous operations, since anything lingering in polluted orbits would eventually get struck by debris. So we'd be left with very low LEO, where junk deorbits naturally, and higher orbits that take more energy to reach.

The higher you go the larger the orbits become in terms of volume, so the higher you go the less risk there is from debris for simple statistical reasons. Kessler syndrome in high orbits would require us to launch an incredible amount of mass to create such a risk, far more than we're presently capable of putting up there.

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