It's funny -- about 8 years ago I remember this exact same issue came up, but the other way around. There was this guy, James Damore, basically a republican who said the diversity program was grievance politics or whatever, sent out a memo to hundreds of other employees, created a kerfuffle, ultimately was fired. He sued and retracted.
Anyways back then I felt some sympathy for the guy, talking politics at work, because as far as I could tell he was a good-faith free-speech proponent. I even wrote a blog post about it and shared it on this site.
However now seeing how much the tables have turned, and how little that cultural swing had to do with free speech, I feel embarrassed about my past self. It's incredibly clear to me that at most a small % of those "free speech" advocates are genuine, because I never see them speak up for the other side (like I did).
Honestly, why should they? People with even a hint of a non-leftist opinion have gotten fired, cancelled, and can't find jobs. Content creators were kicked off the Internet (removing many people's revenue streams) and are even now getting murdered for their opinion.
People on the left can freely talk about murdering their opponents and other horrific things and don't ever have to worry about getting fired. I see the luigi memes all the time, and we all know what it means. Nobody is held accountable for anything.
You've had the luxury and privilege for so long, even a small amount of push back makes you feel like you are having your speech suppressed.
We need more crack down on free speech. When it get's bad enough for the people on the left, maybe we can come to a middle ground.
The largest cancelling brigade in the history of cancel culture was done by the right after the Charlie Kirk shooting, where more than 600 people were doxxed and lost their jobs for "social media posts that celebrated Kirk's assassination or were seen as disparaging of his legacy". [1]
What did I just read? I liked the bits explaining the basics of the difficulties of versioning data, well known points but explained in a simple way. But then it just kept going without any clear central thesis.
Was the central thesis supposed to be that it's impossible for any tools to ever represent complex migrating systems with well-defined data? Because that's not true. Or that it's not practical or cost-effective to do so? Or was there a central point?
You read a series of solid bullet points fleshed out semi-competently using AI, and given a slight human touch. It should be a quarter of this length at least.
But terms of amount-of-money that needed to be reinvested to bring it back to prior highs (let alone ever go like even 50% past its prior high) is significantly more this time.
Yeah I took over a year of singing lessons from a vocal coach and saw minimal improvement.
That’s fine, but it annoys me when people lie about this stuff. I don’t say everyone can program, and that’s okay. Nobody can say “everybody can X” because nobody has met every person.
I mostly agree, almost everything is possible for almost everyone, but some people have hurdles to overcome that would probably take their entire life to overcome.
Having said that, some people choose that path anyway, and sometimes they actually end up mastering the field from the bottom up in a completely new way that no one else would ever think to do.
I say this on the off-chance someone reading this is one of those people. But yeah, I'm not gonna try grow from 5'7 to 6'4 or sprint faster than Usain Bolt. But more power to anyone who tries!
> Well… maybe making thinking machines mass produced…
Now if we could only make thinking machines. ;-)
(Kind of surprised at all the negging of moon landings in this thread. Maybe I'm just of an older generation. At least one other post here points out all the spinoffs in regard to integrated circuits, etc. that came from the previous apace race.)
To be clear I’m not negging the moon landing. I just think it may only Be humanity’s second greatest achievement
But thinking machines, even if they only have an IQ of 70 right now, even if they may end humanity, are still a technological marvel on the order of splitting the atom
Somehow this doesn't feel like the same kind of achievement though. We had the whole of the country pulling for the moon landing. Instead we have a handful of CEO's schmoozing Wall Street, raping the power grid, making hardware unobtainium for the rest of us for this "moon shot".
We chose to go to the moon because it was hard. We choose to build AI because it will make corporate America rich? (Somehow doesn't have the same ring to it in Peoria.)
And as we have already seen, the downsides of AI are extensive—they may turn out to outweigh the benefits? Other than cost, it's hard to find a downside to the moon landing.
I think these people are either bots or paid shills. No other sane explanation for thinking gloried chatbots are better than the space race. It’s not in good faith. Mods do nothing and get mad if you spend too much energy pointing it out.
"These people are bots?" Dude I've been on this site as long as you which is something about my account you could see...
TBH It sounds like this is a tremendously emotional topic for you if it's absolutely inconceivable that somebody could think that anybody could have a different opinion...
I give at least this poster the benefit of the doubt that they're describing something akin to HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey (which we clearly don't yet have). But I suspect they think we're on the cusp of that breakthrough and it will overshadow Apollo in the long term.
No I'm not saying we're no the cusp of anything necessarily.
I'm saying that the best current AI probably has an IQ of at least 60-70, and that is more impressive than getting a few people on the moon for a few hours. As far as I'm concerned we've made another thinking mind, it's not exactly creating life from nothing, but it's pretty close.
Spoiler alert: The wealth will not be spread equally until there is violence to demand it and that’s not going to happen because the “overlords” will make sure people have just enough to get by.
To be fair, I don’t think distributing wealth equally even makes sense but we should definitely aim for distributing wealth in a way that most people can get through life with all their basic needs comfortably met.
Quality is subjective. You would need an arbiter. For example, I would enjoy having an art collective and a funky performance space nearby, but I’m sure many people would consider that a downgrade
I think you're missing the point -- the point is that gasoline companies KNEW ABOUT alternative lead-free substitutes for anti-knock (such as ethanol) and chose lead because they perceived it was less profitable. [1] Specifically because ethanol wasn't patentable and TEL was, and ultimately it WAS patented.
It is more than that - lead and ethanol have other properties that engines that use them need to handle. Lead also acted as a lubricant and parts designed for engines that assumed lead fuel were designed with softer valve seats - switch to unleaded with otherwise equal octane and your will destroy the engine. (though experience shows that unless you were driving your car on a race trace most cars worked fine for longer than the car lasted). Ethanol will destroy some forms of rubber and so you need to use different seals in some parts.
TEL was patentable, but those patents were long expired before there was a big push to eliminate leaded gas.
Also, TEL being patented by Dow (which isn’t an oil company) actually was a reason oil companies would want to use an alternative, if possible. Why would they want to pay Dow to use a patented product, all else being equal?
Ethanol has a propensity to suck up ambient moisture and is more demanding of rubbers and happily attacks aluminum.
In an age of natural rubber components, poorly sealed fuel systems with steel tanks and aluminum carburetors pretty much anything other than ethanol is the "right choice".
And once they ruled out ethanol they settled on lead because it was cheap/profitable. Obviously they chose wrong, they should've picked something more expensive but less terrible.
These weren't cartoon villains with monocles twirling their mustaches. They were normal humans making pragmatic decisions based on the constraints they faced. Without knowing the details people cannot understand what future similar fact patterns may look like.
That said, it should be no surprise to anyone that nobody wants to talk about "well we don't know how bad the harm of leaded exhaust is, we know it's not good, but it's diffuse and undefined so we'll round it to zero/negligible" type decision making, for that sort of unknown rounds to zero logic underpins in whole or part all manner of modern policy discourse.
>Ethanol has a propensity to suck up ambient moisture and is more demanding of rubbers and happily attacks aluminum.
Actually, moisture problems are from using things like homemade alcohol or alcohol from unknown sources, where the likelihood of it already containing a sizable percentage of water has been a problem since the Model T days.
And if that water has a bit of an aggressive pH, it can have an effect on aluminum components.
This is just not a problem with gasoline-alcohol blends from reputable suppliers unless there is serious failure in the supply chain after that, where any fuel would have been contaminated by water regardless. The fuel-grade alcohol is tested before it is added, then the finished gasoline fully analyzed afterward.
Neither moisture nor corrosion is a problem with fuel ethanol or methanol, and when you see convincing information to the contrary (like from a pro mechanic) it often originates from misguided sources, "old wives' tales" for which actual evidence existed without being well-understood. But sometimes the most professional are the ones who don't take any chances, whether "common knowledge" is factual or not, if it doesn't hurt, no big deal.
Miscellaneous polymer compounds were the real question for cars that were not originally made for modern alcohol mixtures.
Ethanol just doesn't absorb moisture into your fuel tank by itself, even from a very humid environment.
Not any more than plain hydrocarbon fuel. In old ventilated fuel tanks, extreme temperature cycling under very humid conditions draws moist air into the tank when the fuel shrinks or is consumed. Kilos of cold fuel and cold metal can continue to condense moisture from the air, when the dew point is greater than the temperature of the tank. After a while you can get grams or ounces of water rolling around in the bottom of the tank. This could build up and stall out the vehicle or keep it from starting.
If it was only an ounce or two of water at the bottom of the tank full of all hydrocarbons, it would actually help to add a gallon of plain (good) alcohol to help dissolve the separated water into the gasoline so it can pass through harmlessly like it always has since gasoline has always had trace amounts of water anyway. Condensation is about as clean as rainwater so it's nothing the engine hasn't seen.
When most mechanics see something like this it has already gotten way out of hand, and there have been waves of anti-alcohol propaganda disseminated through time which reinforce the superstitious component.
Another problem from the '80's was when you do first start using alcohol-containing gasoline in an older car, it can break up varnish that has built up in the tank for years which never would come off until some alcohol came along. This could be a few grams, end up clogging the fuel filter, and the car stalls out no different than from water in the fuel line. Direct cause-and-effect relationship undeniably due to the use of alcohol, with many independent observations. Not a water problem, but who's keeping score.
Just not any more of a problem in the 21st century, similar conditions are so rarely encountered now.
Alcohols have a strong tendency to pull water out of the atmosphere if the percentage of water in the alcohol is below whatever that particular alcohol favors. The only way to keep it dry is to seal it up.
They picked lead because it was the cheapest additive, not because it was more profitable for the industry as a whole. Those two things aren’t the same. In the oil industry, the products are identical and companies compete only on price. If you use the $0.10 per gallon additive when everyone else is using the $0.05 per gallon additive, then your sales collapse because customers just cross the street to save $0.05 per gallon. But if every company switches to the $0.05 gallon additive, that doesn’t mean the companies pocket the extra $0.05 per gallon. Most of that goes to the consumer, because, again, consumers can just cross the street to get the better price.
It’s really a collective action problem. Nobody wants their gasoline to be more expensive than other companies’. So everyone has the incentive to use the cheapest ingredient. If you ban that ingredient, prices go up. But since everyone's prices will go up, you remove the competitive disadvantage.
I think you're missing the point. Without a market-coordinating motivation (i.e., legislation), any company that adopted a more expensive anti-knock would be competed out of the market.
Yeah, if you're going to spend 100 million building a datacenter you should be required to add equivalent grid production in the area. It has drastically increased our electricity prices where I live.
Not building energy production and distribution for the past 50 years is what is causing electricity prices to increase. Chickens coming home to roost. Eventually you run out of the previous generation’s infrastructure investments and cheap tricks like efficiency gains to avoid real capital investment.
Datacenter demand has simply brought demand forward a bit. This was always coming for us.
So long as they are paying market rates like any other power consumer of their size I see zero problem with it. If they are getting sweetheart deals and exemptions from regulatory rates then there would be a problem.
The issue is lack of building stuff that needed to happen 20-30 years ago when it began to be an obvious critical need. De-industrialization just masked the problem.
If we can’t figure out as a society how to come out ahead with a much more robust electric grid after this giant investment bubble we have utterly failed at a generational scale.
I don't think that's true. I think that just shows how disconnected we are.
We tell ourselves that we must have "better lives" than say a native american in the year 1000AD, but there's no reason to think that.
I think odds are that maybe the native american was happier -- having a small group that you spend time with outdoors every day, getting extensive exercise, having a clear sense of purpose, eating healthy fresh food every day, never once thinking about politics or bills or global warming. I bet they liked their life more than a depressed divorced accountant in our modern society, even if we have more material wealth or health access.
Anyways back then I felt some sympathy for the guy, talking politics at work, because as far as I could tell he was a good-faith free-speech proponent. I even wrote a blog post about it and shared it on this site.
However now seeing how much the tables have turned, and how little that cultural swing had to do with free speech, I feel embarrassed about my past self. It's incredibly clear to me that at most a small % of those "free speech" advocates are genuine, because I never see them speak up for the other side (like I did).
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