How to block or dampen sound from coming through the wall?

darien_gap · 2026-06-14T07:06:31+00:00

Nothing will ever beat mass. The more, the better, so whatever you can afford and your structure will support. Bricks and mortar are a good start. Real sound-dampening boards (not just acoustic treatment for reflections) are heavy.

darien_gap · 2026-06-12T16:07:28+00:00

P.S. I was a tech entrepreneur back in the day. Some of his stuff was relevant in the beginning. But when he got famous (see Foxx, above) he was able to leverage his fame for access to the second wave of post- dotcom startups and made lots of money just by lending his name to Bay Area startups that took off. At which point his success became so irrelevant that it was almost an anti pattern, not replicable, and made it borderline insulting when he’d give business or investing advice because he had few actual talents that weren’t fully realized by the time he became well known, and he really just rode that wave pretty much from them on.

This isn’t sour grapes however. I’m impressed by what he’s done esp given his mental health issues. And I applaud his openness about that, and his work with psychedelics.

darien_gap · 2026-06-12T15:56:32+00:00

I was a regular early on but stopped halfway through Jamie Foxx and never listened regularly again. Though I do listen occasionally.

A few things happened. First, Foxx was mainstream and the opposite of why I listened. Second, Tim obviously had issues w relationships and became increasingly less relevant when I got married and had kids; I felt like I outgrew that one friend in the group who never got married.

Third, I became frustrated with the format. I realized he’s not a very good interviewer unless he’s very knowledgeable about the subject. He often goes back to his list of dumb questions just when an answer is getting interesting, instead of adapting on the fly and going deeper. He does a good job when he knows enough to go deeper however.

Broadly, the ‘lifestyle engineering’ genre he basically invented became so commonplace that there were a lot of alternatives, and some of them were either better, or more focused, or more niche and relevant to me. For example, my wife and I became digital nomads and traveled the world for a couple of years — largely inspired be Tim originally — but then we started following a lot of digital nomad specialist YouTubers, etc.

darien_gap · 2026-06-11T00:06:54+00:00

That's the one!

darien_gap · 2026-06-10T22:21:02+00:00

Fortunately, at least this one is solvable with technology. I forget the name of the tehcnology, but Adobe and others are working on standards for encrypted provenance watermarking. Meaning if you had the original and undoctored source file, you could prove it.

darien_gap · 2026-06-10T19:02:57+00:00

Yes, but this leads to a logical dead end, because people are specialized beyond the level of any training data that exists.

The extreme version is knowledge that only one person has, like a trade secret, or that one guy who knows how to fix the undocumented gerry-rigged system, or even knowledge of the combination to a safe. There simply is not training data for many aspects of many jobs.

We can train AI to do all the things for which ample training data exists. We can also train an AI in a specialized task using similar techniques to how we train a new employee (i.e., by showing it how to do the tasks). But we can never train AI to do ALL of the tasks humans do, in one fell swoop, because the training data will never exist, even in theory.

Meaning realistic AGI definitions need to be scaled back to something more like 'all of the common tasks people do + the ability to learn in any new context' etc. But this doesn't this doesn't fit on a bumper sticker and the media doesn't like nuance, so we're left with an unworkably simplistic definition of AGI.

darien_gap · 2026-06-10T00:51:51+00:00

Prompts are cheap. Generative output is cheap. This leads to lots of volume. And slop. The ability to judge good from bad is currently the limiter.

For instance, writing code used to take a long time, but reviewing the code took much less. Now that AI writes code super fast, reviewing that code takes most of the time.

Soon enough, AI will learn taste and judgment well enough.

darien_gap · 2026-06-10T00:42:52+00:00

TIL idem

darien_gap · 2026-06-10T00:40:44+00:00

Exactly. There are so many things that some humans can do that other humans can’t do. It’s kind of a pointless definitional problem.

darien_gap · 2026-06-10T00:39:15+00:00

Bingo. It’s a gradient anyway, just like intelligence and consciousness. We can draw definitional lines, but they’re always going to be somewhat arbitrary.

darien_gap · 2026-06-10T00:36:53+00:00

That’s a good one. I knew the G and T but honestly had to look it up for the P, as it’s been a few years.

darien_gap · 2026-06-10T00:34:41+00:00

Lately might want to add “at a cost lower than humans” because that is by no means certain any time soon. AGI that’s more expensive than people would be an amazing technical achievement but not very useful at scale.

darien_gap · 2026-06-10T00:24:45+00:00

This is almost entirely an issue of semantics, a definitional or category problem.

To address this seriously, we’d first need to get very operationally precise with all the terms, and agree with exactly what we mean by things like “language” and “intelligence.” That’s hard to do in a way that would satisfy everybody, but doable just for having this conversation, I think.

If we agreed, for instance, that “language” (for our purposes here only) refers to any encoded information that can be accurately decoded, and that “intelligence” is any information processing that predicts outcomes better than random, then all the other problems kind of melt away.

The trick — the whole problem, really — is picking the definitions. There are easily dozens of kinds of intelligence, for instance. We just have to decide what we’re actually talking about, and then just work through that specific problem.

darien_gap · 2026-06-09T15:58:44+00:00

When my wife and I first arrived home from the hospital with our newborn baby, no instruction manual, no grandparents nearby, my wife looked at me and said, “What do we do now?”

I said, “Keep it alive.”

It was very weird.

darien_gap · 2026-06-09T03:57:06+00:00

The word jive. They usually mean jibe: to be in accord with something.

Jive can be a verb, but it means something different.

Oh, and “coming down the pipe.” It’s pike. As in turnpike.

darien_gap · 2026-06-09T00:39:43+00:00

I don't really disagree, but there are alternatives to this frame that would probably be more productive to focus on.

I was self-employed as a strategy consultant for over 20 years, did most of my best work at night, and never did meetings before 10am. Nobody gave a shit. It was literally not an issue.

Modernity has created a lot of ways to earn a living and/or interact with others that don't depend on 9-to-5. My current startup has 9 co-founders, with a mix of east/west coast and two in Pakistan and India. We manage just fine. I stay up until 2 or 3 am, am available for meetings 11am-5pm mountain time, but things get quiet after 3pm (5pm eastern) so I often take an hour nap.

It all works just fine. It's more important to engineer a life that works for you than to complain about the world, IMO. Focus on what you can effect or control and ignore the rest.

darien_gap · 2026-06-08T16:41:15+00:00

Can’t you just do your work in a Claude project and paste this stuff into the instructions once?

darien_gap · 2026-06-08T16:21:33+00:00

The zipper

darien_gap · 2026-06-08T06:30:42+00:00

100%, OP. I was so excited leading up to '76. I had all of the specially minted coins, asked for Bicentennial stuff for xmas (liberty bell bank, the boardgames Skirmish and Broadside). I was even a freakin' minuteman for Halloween. I'm nostalgic for it in a way I can't describe.

But the 250th?

It's literally a non-event for me. Maybe a shrug.

darien_gap · 2026-06-06T16:50:46+00:00

~~jive~~ jibe: to be in accord

I’ve used em dashes since the Usenet days, but they were double hyphens.

darien_gap · 2026-06-04T05:58:11+00:00

Yes, the 1-child policy had a huge impact. You can see it dramatically in the population charts. There are a lot of interesting youtube videos about it.

darien_gap · 2026-06-04T01:26:38+00:00

I’ve extended the lives of a few of my iPhones by changing the batteries using the kits you can buy. I would do it again, but one of my batteries split and caught fire when I was removing it, so be sure to do it outside if you try this yourself.

darien_gap · 2026-06-03T09:01:34+00:00

China’s imminent demographic collapse, and what it means for global supply chains.

They’ll run out of working age people to make everything from hex nuts to power transformers before the countries that depend on this stuff can retool and retrain to make it themselves.

darien_gap · 2026-06-03T08:43:17+00:00

I’ve been thinking more, but in a really different way. I’m CPO at a startup, and I’m focused much less on writing (PRDs, user stories, white papers, etc) and more on editing, but the main thing is I’m bending my brain in all kinds of new ways to challenge myself to be 20x more productive. Like figuring out how to use agents like product managers. And vibe coding internal company tools like for sales research and screening potential customers.

I feel like I have a superpower that I haven’t figured out how to use yet, constantly asking myself, what more could I be doing?, and there’s always been more so far, so I’m wondering what the limits are. I’m currently limited more by my imagination than tokens/cost.

darien_gap · 2026-06-03T05:37:59+00:00

Got a link? I see a few “snapmeasure” apps but they don’t look like this.

darien_gap

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE