Glad someone made this point. I'm curious how long people think most items in a grocery store last? Just consider the trucks you see stocking them on a daily basis. Typically it is bread and other high flow consumables, no?
Everything you figured out about crypto was known then. You had to choose to disregard that information and continue on. And you did, and it took you eight years to figure it out. And now that you have money, you think you have special insight others did not.
Sorry, you don’t. There’s going to be a significant portion of people reading this saying, “No shit”.
But congrats on winning at the casino I guess.
Reminds me of something Joel Spolsky wrote about on his blog. The best managers were those who "moved the furniture out the way". Basically clear the way for the people working on the problem to do so.
To compare: Three profiles of people with diagnosed Autism.
Blindboy Boatclub: An Irish satirist who wears a plastic bag on his head in public appearances. Formerly of a band called The Rubberbandits. Today he is known for his podcast and has authored three books of short stories. He comes across as eccentric, but he's quite capable of managing in society otherwise.
Side note, one of the other members of The Rubberbandits went by the moniker of Mr Chrome, but is better known to people as Bobby Fingers today.
My stepson: Just a teenager navigating one of the more emotionally turbulent times while being noticeably different. He has fine motor issues and some social deficiencies. The best I could describe it is that he's emotionally a few years behind where other kids his age would be. He has few accommodations, mostly extra time and the ability to leave a situation that is overstimulating him. He's odd, probably always be a bit odd. May never be able to tie his shoes, but with work, he should be able to navigate society as a functioning adult one day.
Wife's student: My wife is a special education teacher and she has a student who is completely non-verbal. However, he is noticeably intelligent and can form complex thoughts and can attempt to express them. Managed to use his visual communication device to insult one of his teachers based on her appearance. He will likely have issues for his entire life and will likely need constant therapy.
Now, what one thing can we do for these three very different autistic people?
There's a reason people say "When you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism". While there are some commonalities and typical comorbidities, what we regard as autism presents in so many different ways, it's incredibly difficult to construct a single program to address it.
And I can see why we'd want to break it up. But that gets difficult as well. My stepson started low-verbal. Didn't speak for a while. Spoke rarely for a while longer. And now he speaks a lot. And he's learning when it is appropriate to speak and to handle people speaking around him but not to him. So he was non-verbal. But then became verbal. But not all autistic children cross that border.
> My stepson: Just a teenager navigating one of the more emotionally turbulent times while being noticeably different. He has fine motor issues and some social deficiencies. The best I could describe it is that he's emotionally a few years behind where other kids his age would be. He has few accommodations, mostly extra time and the ability to leave a situation that is overstimulating him. He's odd, probably always be a bit odd. May never be able to tie his shoes, but with work, he should be able to navigate society as a functioning adult one day.
As someone with some similar issues, a) my motor skills are fine, b) the focus on tieing shoes is so frustrating; velcro shoes are everywhere, you can even get Dr. Martens high boots with zippers so you don't have to tie them... like sure, try laces and if it works great... but just provide the accommodation and move on. :P
On the plus side, everyone said playing video games would help my fine motor skills, so I got an out to play a lot of video games, which I enjoyed. :D And my atrocious penmanship hasn't been an issue in adult life, because nobody writes anything anymore (and have you seen the penmanship for kids that were in 2-4th grade during covid ... it's worse than mine!)
Yes, it's incredibly easy to do these things once you've done all these other, incredibly difficult things first.
The furthest a human has been is 250k miles (far side of the moon). The fastest a human has traveled is only 0.0037% the speed of light.
The ISS is about 260 miles from the Earth. At that height, the gravity is actually roughly the same as on the surface, it's only because it is in constant freefall that you experience weightlessness on it.
Mars is 140 million miles away. And not exactly hospitable.
I like how you treat "the fusion problem" with a throwaway, "Yeah, we'd have to solve that" as if we just haven't sufficiently applied ourselves yet.
All of those incredibly difficult things we have not even begun to do are the technical reasons we have not gone interstellar and may be the reason we will never do so.
And even if we solve the issue of accelerating a human being to acceptable speeds to reach another star, the next closest star is 4 light years away. That means light takes 4 years to reach. Even if you could average half the speed of light, that's 8 years, one way. Anything you send is gone.
It's 2025. The first heavier than air flight was barely more than a century ago. The first human in space was less than 70 years ago.
These enabling technologies are very, very hard. No doubt about it. That's why we can't do this today, or even a century from now.
But the physics show it's possible and suggest a natural evolution of capabilities to get there. We are a curious species that is never happy to keep our present station in life and always pushes our limits. If colonizing the solar system is technically possible, we'll do it, sooner or later, even if it takes hundreds or even thousands of years to get there.
> I like how you treat "the fusion problem" with a throwaway, "Yeah, we'd have to solve that" as if we just haven't sufficiently applied ourselves yet.
If you'd read my comment, you'd see I didn't say that. Fusion rockets would help, but we don't need them.
Nuclear pulse propulsion or fission fragment rockets could conceivably get us to the 0.01-0.05c range, and the physics is well understood.
> And even if we solve the issue of accelerating a human being to acceptable speeds to reach another star, the next closest star is 4 light years away. That means light takes 4 years to reach. Even if you could average half the speed of light, that's 8 years, one way. Anything you send is gone.
Getting to 0.5c is essentially impossible without antimatter, and we have no idea how to make it in any useful quantity. Realistically, we're going there at less than 0.1c, probably less then 0.05c. Nobody who leaves is ever coming back, and barring huge leaps in life sciences, they probably aren't going to be alive at the destination either. It'd be robotic probes and subsequent generation ships to establish colonies. But if you get to the point where you are turning the asteroid belt into O'Neill cylinders, a multi-century generation ship starts to sound feasible.
You are talking about massive investments to shoot off into space never to return. Who's paying for that? The only way you do that is if you're so fucked, it's your only option and the profit in it is the leaving.
Not to mention, we need to solve the problems of living in space. Which we haven't yet. According to NASA. The space people.
And it very well could be an insurmountable problem. We do not know. We do know that living in microgravity fucks you up. We know that radiation fucks you up. But we don't even know all the types of radiation one might encounter.
> But if you get to the point where you are turning the asteroid belt into O'Neill cylinders
That right there is an example of "solve this impossibly hard problem and the rest is easy". We are nowhere near doing anything close to that.
There is another way. Irrationality. People spend a lot on religion. Like a whole lot.
What if there was a faith system of ultimatley going to interstellar medium. You have faith, you automatically pay, like the rest of the people and you dont question it. You get tax breaks. It will help you in the end of times or something.
Just decide the ultimate goal to be interstellar medium touching in all directions.
You are a farmer? Well now you continue to farm to feed budding spacers. You are a game dev? Well, people are going to get bored in space, continue developing games for the ultimate goal.
My response to the money aspect of this it's just like any other business: money needs to be invested, and then a return will be realized. Resource extraction (i.e, asteroid mining) is one obvious example.
The human compatibility issues with microgravity are well known, as is the solution, which has even been proposed by NASA: centripetal force to create 1G for the astronauts.
As far the the radiation goes, we do indeed know exactly what kinds of radiation they would encounter. And the easiest way to shield humans from it in space is lots of water, or metal. We know this from extensive real work done on earth re: nuclear power plants.
The real issue is money, not technical feasibility. Once the dough rolls in from asteroid mining, it bootstraps the financing issue and pays for itself many times over.
NASA seems less sure than you do. And considering we have to get to the asteroids before we even start to think about mining them, talking about the money from asteroid mining is putting the cart before the horse.
Asteroid mining is one thing. Exploring the nearest star system is science expedition where the payback is in societal scientific knowledge and subsidizing technology development that is then made available here for various things (eg a lot of the space exploration tech in the 60s made its way into consumer tech)
And once you have done those incredibly difficult things it is possible that the game changes entirely. A significant number of humans could live in space and have limited contact with planets.
It's not nothing, but IQ is already a little squishy. No one's IQ is a single number. But the article also goes into problems with the study and other potential issues.
Basically, they're saying there is this pattern in the data as recorded, but there are multiple confounding factors and issues with collecting the data in the first place.
It's a single number in that if you take an IQ test one time you get one number, but that doesn't mean you'll get that exact number every single time you take an IQ test. Even ignoring more complex questions about them, your score on an IQ test will vary depending on simple things like how tired you are when you take it, so in practice there's some variance and you do not always get the same number every time you take a test.
This is a deeper question than it sounds. The "point" of a modern IQ test is to identify cognitive deficits to target interventions. It's abused widely among non-practitioners as a ranking of intelligence, which it is not.
I don't think we have to hash this out, because "marker of intelligence" and "ranking of intelligence" are not the same thing. A rank implies a reliable scale, which IQ doesn't provide.
(It's also just fine if we disagree about this --- researchers do too!)
I mean, nothing in the human body can be truly represented by a single number.
Even height and weight change throughout the day. People are typically taller and lighter in the morning than in the evening. Weight especially is variable, it can fluctuate up to 5 to 6 pounds.
I think the issue with that is that linux is the kernel. Everything around it is how you interact with it. So how to change settings would be the responsibility of the shell used. And there are several shells and even window managers on top of those. I forget if there's a graphical shell, but it's irrelevant.
And that's not getting into the issue of whether or not something is a kernel issue or not. And it could be the responsibility of the distro to provide the tools to change the settings.
Basically, it's a lot of people with no obligation to each other trying to work in concert.
The situation on Windows is different. Windows is both the kernel and the shell and the window manager and the provider for a lot of the core tools.
Apple sidestepped the issue with OSX. They took a robust kernel, FreeBSD, and created a GUI and tools on top of that. I think they also essentially took over FreeBSD or at least forked it internally.
> They took a robust kernel, FreeBSD, and created a GUI and tools on top of that. I think they also essentially took over FreeBSD or at least forked it internally.
They used NeXT’s XNU kernel which was a merger between CMU’s Mach and Berkeley’s 4.3BSD. They later refreshed it with code from OSF’s MK derivative of Mach (which also incorporated some code from the University of Utah) and code from FreeBSD, and have added a huge amount of new code of their own. They continue to pull new code from FreeBSD every now and again, but it isn’t so much a plain fork of FreeBSD as a merger between parts of FreeBSD and a lot of other stuff with a completely different heritage
Also, the backstock is minimal. Stores are designed for turnaround.
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