I'd first question whether the NY Times' accounting included the carbon footprint within NZ, where the lambs are probably raised far from the shipping piers. Then you've got the infrastructure and power requirements for freezing for the long ocean voyage. Then...
After that, I'd question local sheep farmers about how suitable upstate NY is for raising lambs, compared to NZ. And about the regulatory and business environment they face. Agriculture in the US is a hellish mess, and the great majority of its problems are caused by neither its associated carbon emissions nor by underinvesting in transportation infrastructure.
Many open mathematical problems of form "There are no numbers satisfying the following criteria..." were resolved when computers became fast enough to perform arbitrary-precision arithmetic at decent speed. Some folks got excited at the time - but it was soon obvious that 99% of mathematics was not usefully accessible to number-crunching approaches. Will modern AI's similarly prove poor at cracking a large percentage of hard math problems?
How much is this situation about AI, and how much is it about throwing AI-bubble $billions at math problems? Lead times would be longer, but you might see incredible progress in astronomy, physics, or a number of other fields, if the richest people in the world were throwing blank-check budgets at building space telescopes, or atom smashers, or whatever.
American, in an area getting more roundabouts. The two most heartfelt criticisms of roundabouts I've heard are:
- I have to pay attention every time I go through one. (Vs. having your mind elsewhere works fine with traffic lights? That might explain some of those T-bone crashes.)
From my PoV, roundabouts are generally a good thing. Mostly because local engineering standards for traffic lights are wretchedly low - so I can get where I'm going far faster through roundabouts.
As a European, that roundabout intersection looks fine? It might be slightly annoying to have to use all three roundabouts if you're exiting the highway northbound and want to take the southbound local road, but with the amount of exits there I can't imagine a junction would be better.
To an American it looks painfully small and slow for coming off a highway and would be overwhelmed often with cars and semi-truck traffic. One semi-truck would stop an entire circles worth of cars with its ass end swinging in and out. And highway travellers are going to be gun shy and not respond as quickly to gaps in the circle after doing 75+mph for an hour or more.
> If today it takes twenty years of math study to reach the frontier ...
Are you counting from when a kid first learn 1 + 1 = 2? That seems a misleading metric. The rate at which kids are learning math in the first half to 2/3 of their schooling is very low. Or are you asserting that Ph.D.'s don't reach the frontier until age 40+?
Actually, the frontier of math is too far away for most humans to reach because >99% of humans don't have the drive and talent to study and learn enough advanced math. Similar barriers exclude >99% of people from Olympic-level athletics, or being famed violinists, or being important architects, or being US Senators, or being successful ancient historians, or many other things.
Ask a lawyer about sending an unpleasant letter to the scanner, detailing the situation and demanding that they cease & desist. That clobbers their "we didn't know" defense, and their Legal Dept. will likely order them to stop ASAP.
... inflating his salary by falsely claiming degrees from Clemson University in South Carolina and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, according to an FBI agent’s affidavit filed in court.
How in hell was our post-Snowden Creep State unable to notice such things?
> How in hell was our post-Snowden Creep State unable to notice such things?
Because it doesn't exist. The data got stored, sometimes, somewhere. But a lot of it is deleted or corrupted or never computed on. Believing there is a secret core of competence in the American state is appealing. But from what I can tell, the evidence doesn't sustain it.
That was a throw-away name, and "he" was fabricated as part of an Nvidia demand-stimulation black op.
You don't go from being an obscure video card outfit to the #1 most valuable company on the planet by being too hesitant or dim to really get creative.
It does provide an explanation as to why Satoshi’s wallets have gone untouched (besides him being dead). $70B ain’t that much compared to a $5T market cap.
"Conspiracy" requires an unlawful or wrongful purpose. Please assume that the op was run from a jurisdiction where using a pseudonym on the internet was not illegal, and various sorts of influencer and meme marketing were well-accepted practices.
Really, compared to an animated tiger telling kids that sugar-laden Frosted Flakes(tm) are "Great!", Task Peppermint was positively benevolent.
In the True Conspiracy Theorist sense of Believe? No. It's an obvious Follow The Money theory, with Nvidia being particularly topical, a few "how might a rational business exec do this?" details, and Task Peppermint thrown on as an amusement. I could say something similar with (say) Britain's GCHQ as the mastermind - though their motives would be less clear.
This Even skimming the web could take up 1000X the hours I have in a day, and I really should spend more time exercising, and reading books, and with friends and family, and volunteering, and ...
Yes. Their reputation is taking on the reputation of projects they support. If they want to keep good reputation, they should watch over their sponsored projects.
Do we generally feel like they have a good reputation these days though? Like I don't know what people say on Twitter now I guess, but I do remember when they were advertising Elon speaking at their conference at the height of the Government Efficiency saga, and it really dawned on me that something like public sentiment is kinda low priority for them.
And for what its worth (very little), I have worked at this point at various YC startups over close to a decade now, and it can't help but be a quite negative signal to me as non-CEO, lowly dev worker. I get that they have a bunch of successes under their belt, and this is near superstition on my part, but the heuristic of staying away from YC companies has made me a much happier employee.
The reputation thing is not an exact science. They might not care and then it might completely sink them one day. It's generally good to have good reputation and I think IT is losing it fast.
I thought the reputation that mattered to YC was for taking on could-be-very-profitable startups, and making them (statistically) much more profitable.
Also, might your argument require that YC's leaders eventually gain access to a time machine, so they could advise their earlier selves against supporting projects which later proved disreputable?
No, what's done is done. You can achieve a lot with bad reputation too. But maybe one day the stream of startups or even the stream of money will dry up. As I said earlier, it's not an exact science and you never know when bad reputation will bite you.
> In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again.
Wow - TIL. But skimming through Google's AI summary of the history of this (evidently extremely popular) idea, it sure sounds like a very-convenient-but-false meme.
The Roman Republic was famously non-feudal, and dominated by its equivalent of the later bourgeoisie. Many other pre-gunpowder societies were also non-feudal.
Marxist History is extremely fond of the concept...but subsequent history has shown Marxism's understanding of history to be rather lacking.
The "peasant with gun kills knight" meme pushes a lot of buttons - but only idiots obsessed with tradition would don armor and lead from atop horses, out front, on a battlefield with lots of effective guns. Vs., say, using their wealth and power to arm and train squads of gun-armed infantry, then mostly lead from the rear.
The undercurrent I see is that Europe was feudal when it was backward enough (both socially and technologically) and isolated enough so that control of the land meant control of most of the possible wealth. And no large and more-competent neighbor (Persians, Monguls, whoever) could sweep in and conquer. But unfortunately for the feudal ruling class, social and technological advances kept reducing the fraction of wealth that land ownership gave them. And their foundation stone of noble blood being superior proved itself wrong over and over and over and over and ... Meanwhile, non-land-derived wealth kept rising, and that was controlled by a relatively meritocratic social class, who had rather little reason to support the blueblood idiots.
After that, I'd question local sheep farmers about how suitable upstate NY is for raising lambs, compared to NZ. And about the regulatory and business environment they face. Agriculture in the US is a hellish mess, and the great majority of its problems are caused by neither its associated carbon emissions nor by underinvesting in transportation infrastructure.
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