I think there’s plenty of interesting debates to be had about immigration policy and its effects on the labor market, but one thing worth noting here is that the primary problem that damn near every other country on earth has isn’t immigration, it’s brain drain.
A core strategic strength of the US over the last century has been that everyone with any talent wants to come here to work, and by and large we’ve let them do so. You can argue how well that’s worked out for us - having worked with a great many extremely talented H1bs in an industry largely built by immigrants, I’d consider it pretty positive - but it damn sure hasn’t worked out well for the countries those talented folks came from.
> After New York replaced the sodium-vapor lights in the city’s 250,000 streetlamps with shiny new LEDs in 2017, the experience of walking through the city at night transformed, almost . . . overnight. Forgiving, romantic, shadowy orange gave way to cold, all-seeing bluish white.
Before the late 1970s, NYC was illuminated at night by pinkish-white incandescent bulbs.
When the yellow monstrosities were rolled out people almost rioted. Their harsh orange glow invaded bedrooms creeping between gaps in curtains and assaulting the eyes, destroyed the soft and warm ambiance that had set the night scene for generations, and muted all colors into a monochromatic hellscape.
After just 30 seconds on TimesMachine I found an article from 1982 about the transition and how some residents were hesitant and one jurisdiction rejected the change out of hand. It took a long time for NYC to gain its orange glow and people didn't like it. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1982/09/12/137...
Lol here's another article from the 40s: "Sodium light is not suitable for city streets, Commissioner Goodman said, because it gives a person a sallow appearance not liked by women."
People of my age view them as a nuisance born out of the austerity of the 1970s, a temporary suboptimal fix that persisted due to inertia. A reminder of the rot and desperation of the that era.
Ah yes—as the saying goes: “keep your friends at the Bayes-optimal distance corresponding to your level of confidence in their out-of-distribution behavior, and your enemies closer”
Imagine if ancient man, living in the woods, saw people of today living in cities. "It feels very uncomfortable seeing all of these people isolating themselves inside buildings".
In fact the very opposite is the case. Now, we go into nature to isolate ourselves.
In the future, going into virtual reality will be where you go to interact with others, and you'll take the goggles off to isolate yourself.
There are enormous advantages to living (as much as possible of) your life in VR:
- your home can be arbitrarily large at zero cost and without taking any land away from anyone else
- you can change the decor whenever you want at zero cost
- you can paint walls as ornately as you like, at zero cost, immediately, without even any prep work required
- you spend zero time on travelling
- you can instantly hang out with friends in foreign countries for free without even needing a visa
As long as the technology is good enough (and please remember that qualifier, because people normally respond with an implicit assumption that the technology is not good enough) - as long as the technology is good enough VR is strictly better than current reality.
GPT-3 didn't even need the `gloober Blue` prompt as part of `Answer:`. It 0-shotted (no other training examples required) it straight out of the box.
Prompt:
Every turn each gloober flomps the same gloobers. If a yellow gloober flomps a blue gloober then the blue gloober turns yellow, otherwise, gloobers stay the same color.
1. gloober Roy flomps gloober Zoo and gloober Bat
2. gloober Zoo flomps gloober Bat and gloober Crystal
3. gloober Crystal flomps gloober X-Ray
4. gloober Bat flomps gloober Blue
If gloober Zoo is the only gloober that is yellow, and all other gloobers are blue, will gloober Blue turn yellow, and, if so, at what turn?
Answer:
Continuation:
gloober Blue will turn yellow on turn 4.
> I find it a little unsettling that GPT-3 is able to do this well.
I agree and think that this is definitely the right reaction.
That's actually a weakness. These things can't really determine what they don't know. They just bullshit. Example:
> Me: Explain the steps to construct a square with the area of a circle by using only a finite number of steps with a compass and straightedge.
> ChatGPT: Draw the circle and use the compass to mark off a length on the circumference equal to the radius of the circle. Use the straightedge to draw a line from the end of the marked length to the center of the circle. Use the compass to draw a second arc that intersects the first arc and the line you just drew. Use the straightedge to draw a line from the point where the second arc intersects the first arc to the center of the circle. This line will be the diagonal of the square. Use the compass to draw a line from the end of the diagonal to the center of the circle. This will be the side of the square. Use the straightedge to draw the remaining three sides of the square, completing the figure. The resulting square will have the same area as the circle.
Sounds great, very authoritative, seems like a great answer at first glance. Only problem is that squaring the circle is impossible.
The cause in this case was AWDL (Apple Wireless Direct Link.) Holding the Option key while clicking the Wi-Fi icon and clicking "Enable Wi-Fi Logging" and then checking /var/log/wifi.log will show AWDL scans starting and ending randomly, and when the scan is active it causes latency spikes every 1s like clockwork. Unrelated to AWDL, but if a process is requesting a Wi-Fi network scan (different from an AWDL scan), /var/log/wifi.log will also tell you the name of the process, such as "locationd" when the Location Service needs your location. (Tangential, but the locationd process rarely causes these latency spikes for me - on a default macOS install it very rarely requests scans in my experience, backed by my analysis of the log.)
AWDL has to be used for things like AirDrop, so it's expected to have this latency increase while you have the AirDrop window open scanning for nearby devices / sending files to other devices. There are other uses of AWDL (AirPlay, Auto Unlock, Universal Clipboard at the very least)[0], but I don't know what was triggering it so actively in my case... and why it wasn't happening on my M1 Air. It also wasn't always happening in the background like this, it just started that day.
The "fix" was to disable the awdl0 interface, but that may also cause AirDrop/AirPlay and related services to not function (I did not test.) It's easy to re-enable it though.
To disable:
ifconfig awdl0 down
To enable:
ifconfig awdl0 up
Upon disabling, the latency spikes go away permanently.
The article mentions the ban in 2006 of over-the-counter sales of Sudafed (pseudoephedrine). One of my favorite satirical articles is "A simple and convenient synthesis of pseudoephedrine from N-methylamphetamine". (The joke being that Sudafed is now hard to purchase while meth is readily available.)
I've been running my macOS desktop in an ESXi VM for over a year now. I came from a hackintosh, but got tired of the fragility of some upgrades. Some notes on this setup:
- Apple supports macOS running inside of ESXi. Officially, only on Apple host hardware (i.e. a Mac Pro, which is on the ESXi compatibility list). Apple even ships a VMXNet3 network driver in macOS.
- For ESXi specifically, you have to patch the host to boot macOS on non-Apple hardware. There's an explicit "am I running on Apple hardware?" check in there. DrDonk's unlocker on GitHub is what you need.
- You can specify board-id, ROM/MLB, etc values via your .vmx file. iMessage and everything work for me, but I'm also using identifiers from a real Mac Mini I retired a few years ago. I expect this will still work okay with generated data if you follow hackintosh guides.
- I pass through a GPU and a USB controller card for input/output. For USB, find an FL1100 chipset card, like the Inateck models, which works out of box on macOS, Windows, etc. Recently I moved my boot drive to a passed-through NVMe for extra speed. My other drives are ESXi virtual drives backed by storage elsewhere on my network.
- Most NVIDIA GPUs will need the NVIDIA Web Drivers to work. Kepler generation cards are the last to work out of box, and the only to currently work out of box on Mojave. If you don't need hefty performance, a GeForce GT 730 is a cheap card. Apple and NVIDIA are still not getting along, so I expect this will only get worse.
- However, I've never been able to get an AMD card to initialize via passthrough. The PCI device is seen, but the EFI strings or whatever else Apple is using to determine initialization paths are wrong. I recently spent awhile trying to figure this out, going so far as to write my own SSDT tables for the device, but finally gave up.
- This particular guide is using Chameleon, which is considered an outdated bootloader. Clover is far more flexible, and will work in VM setups that don't natively implement SMC like ESXi. (For the longest time Clover would crash an ESXi VM, but this now works as of a month or two ago).
And finally, on the context of this whole thing--I switched from a real Mac Pro to a hackintosh years and years ago, when it became clear Apple didn't care about upgrading the hardware. They still don't. The last Mac Pro release was 2013 (the 2013 iPhone was a 5S!). They've been promising things will improve "soon". They're the world's most valuable company; if they actually cared, at the organizational DNA level, it would have happened by now.
A core strategic strength of the US over the last century has been that everyone with any talent wants to come here to work, and by and large we’ve let them do so. You can argue how well that’s worked out for us - having worked with a great many extremely talented H1bs in an industry largely built by immigrants, I’d consider it pretty positive - but it damn sure hasn’t worked out well for the countries those talented folks came from.