Been working this for a few months now. It’s not a crazy hard problem - but it does break the mold of distance and speed taking priority over capacity. If you have any questions feel free to ask. I can get into the pros/cons of all the various options and tuning knobs.
Saw the one video linked here comparing other existing transport ratios, and asking for double that is 'not crazy hard'? It certainly sounds like a challenge.
Yeah I'd be interested to hear more about what the options might be. Also curious why it is that DARPA thinks this is solvable, but no one has come close yet.
The tunable influences on a rotor are primarily velocity (rotation speed) and surface area (radius). Conceptually it’s more similar to something like a human powered helicopter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroVelo_Atlas) than you might expect.
How does the cognitive dissonance of having the luxury to express that opinion while being protected by the most powerful military in the world not rip you apart?
It feels like the US military is 90% racketeering and 10% physically protecting Americans, if that. Most of our protection comes from two gigantic oceans on both sides.
Though, I really do enjoy this racket so I guess I'm not allowed to ask any questions about the ethics of keeping it going.
My favorite idea is to tie student loans and grants not to the individual per say, but rather their choice of institution and study. For example, a student going to MIT for a hard, well-paying science career should be able to access more capital at a better rate than someone attending a party school to major in a lower-paying humanities field. Some have taken the current state of things to imply a failure of capitalism - when in fact what we are seeing is a distortion by non-capitalist principals. When you subsidize without regard for investment risk you skew the incentive structure. As it stands the optimum result is generated by maximizing enrollment and changing whatever additional sum a student can pay on top of what the government provides. Since it doesn't matter what they major in, or what the institutional quality is, the market adapts accordingly. By attaching student loan quantities and qualities to both the major and institution, we ensure equal access to the individual but leave market incentives to ensure quality. The break down in academic quality and corresponding labor market corrections is entirely predicated on institutional optimization through misalignments in subsidization. You can still make the system fair to individuals from non-traditional backgrounds without making it equal. I would argue that you can even do more to increase equitability to historically marginalized groups once you decouple from the 'flat rate' approach. The system is broken because we broke it. The solution is not to continue down the path of misaligned incentives but rather make sure the incentives are properly considered.
This has been tried multiple times actually via ISAs and other instruments. Immediately inverts to adverse selection - eg the students who are going for a more lucrative option don't want to participate.
That said, the letter here wasn't about undergrad or expensive college - its about the federal government stripping funding for research for political reasons. Sad. We should be investing in US research capabilities. And like it or not, our research universities are pretty freaking good at... research.
Nicotine is the only psychoactive substance proven to increase intellectual function. Rote neurogenisis does not - much in the same way height isn’t a proxy for IQ. Stimulants like Adderall, Caffiene, etc are Dunning-Kruger by proxy.
Maybe a better term is “stimulant-induced metacognitive miscalibration”. An induced a state of overconfidence similar to Dunning-Kruger - even thought the underlying mechanism is different.
You perceive the idea as great not because you suddenly understand it better or know more. You think the idea is great because of the dopamine flooding your brain. And much like Dunning-Kruger, even thought you might think you did better, real world results don’t match your expectations.
We are about to experience the commoditization of intellectual work, in much the same way the Industrial Revolution commoditized manual production. I don’t expect a Musk-esque abundance utopia this decade, but the impact will exceed anything we’ve seen in centuries. There is not an industry on earth that won’t change in the next few decades.
To conceptualize AI as merely “superficially plausible text” would be like writing off a Watt steam engine in 1776. The current AI bubble might be early, but it won’t be wrong. The fervor with which corporations are exploring the space stems not from misplaced optimism but an existential threat. Right now every industry is vulnerable to disruption on a massive scale.
And we’re still in the early stages. Frontier models like Claude or GPT-5.5 are still just tuning 2017’s “Attention is All You Need” with MoE, RLHF, and more compute. We are roughly where online services were in the early 90s, when Prodigy and CompuServe were battling it out for market share before the open web swept them aside.
We are still waiting for the modern equivalents of Yahoo, Google, Amazon, and Facebook, never mind the lessers. As Tim Berners-Lee said of the web: “we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.”
On one hand this author, Robert Kagan, is best known for encouraging GWB to invade Iraq. So if anyone knows about the perils of starting a war in the Middle East it’s him. But experience is a multiplier on intellect, and zero times anything is still zero.
Reading through the list of projects that the Linux Foundation supports (via infrastructure, governance, events, etc) with the other 181 million is honestly shocking. They are supporting, among like a thousand others - NodeJS/OpenJS, PyTorch, Electron, K8s, vLLM, ONNX, PX4, GraphQL - plus the 'smaller' entries like Zephyr, Containerd, gRPC, KiCAD, ESLint, Fastify, etc. Their portfolio is literally insane. This is the BlackRock of the entire digital world.
Lets see; a phone os no one used, and ad on installed without user permision as a tie-for a TV show, browser integration with a thirdparty bookmarking service that should have been an optional addon, a VPN, an abborted browser based video confercing service based on open standards that they killed for non obvious reasons, a bunch of social justice initiatives, an email masking/forwarding service killing their addon APIs in favor of googles more limited api.
To be fair to the vpn product, at least they did it through a partnership with mullvad, one of the least-terrible (not even in the same ballpark as the likes of nordvpn, etc) commercial vpn service providers in existence.
Ironically legalization has done more to reduce weeds popularity than any ad campaign. The old-school California medical system was honestly much better than what we see now though. Rather than moving marijuana to an alcohol type model, I wish they had moved alcohol to a medical marijuana one instead. Quick doctors appointment every 6-12 months on an opt in basis - just a check up to make sure you are partaking responsibly. America loves to make things a binary; all or nothing.
This turns out to be false for addiction-class things like cigarettes, alcohol, and opium where a chemical dependency is statistically likely to form across an entire population. Oxycontin (for example) trivially overwhelms “I know my needs” and virtually the entire population is vulnerable, barring those very few of us with the anti-addiction adaptations (who then also tend to lack a working feeling of completion-success, which is a curse in its own right!). Most societies choose not to apply a Darwinian filter along those lines, as evidenced by the absence of addiction testing and culling at birth, so it doesn’t make much sense to consider that with adults, either — and as one of those few without the proper brain wiring for the rewards-addiction circuit, I have zero interest in a world populated exclusively by people with brains like mine. There are solidly good reasons we have these neurotransmitter systems and it’s a bad plan to winnow out those who don’t by applying an Randian ethos to drug policies.
Listing the three most addictive, dependency-inducing and mortally dangerous substances used by humans to temporarily achieve a stress-free mental state doesn’t mean cannabis belongs in the same neighborhood.
Simply denying regulatory authority over an intoxicant, as proposed by the devil’s advocate argument I replied to, is obviously incorrect: all intoxicants are intoxicating and intoxication carries a risk of addiction. Where to set regulatory hurdles versus illegalities is much less obvious, and worth considering, but it’s never ‘fully unregulated’ in a prosocial society; if one provides a substance of altered mind, then some subset of those altered will suffer addiction. That’s the downside of our relationship with poisons: sometimes they poison our willpower.
It’s not so simple as ”intoxicant” being addictive.
Many ”intoxicants” are inherently not addictive and may even help getting rid of other addictions (ayahuasca / DMT / other psychedelics).
Many things are not ”intoxicants” yet are addictive.
Addiction is a feature of human physiology. More specifically, FosB turning into delta-FosB seems to be the generic marker of any type of addiction, and it directly drives addictive behaviors when overexpressed in the prefrontal cortex.
The physiology is a result of millions of years of evolutionary adaptation, and while it must have correlated with evolutionary fitness at some point(s) and in some scenario(s), modern humans are surrounded by so many novel stimuli and ways of self-stimulation that we simply have not yet had the time to physiologically adapt to the situation where some of our addictions are not actually conferring true increases in our evolutionary fitness.
That our society’s economic strategy is effectively “how close can we skirt the line to serfdom and slavery” has no bearing on the devil’s advocate proposal of wholly-unregulated intoxicants that I’m replying to. The state will tend to deregulate so long as the intoxicant leaves workers inefficiently functional when they’re at work, but to strictly regulate when it impacts the job market; yet, neither of these tendencies have any bearing on whether we should regulate or not, they’re just inherent biases to be aware of when discussing our society.
As well, take care not to assume that to regulate is to make illegal, make medical-only, impose punitive taxes, etc. Sometimes the outcome of regulation is refusing to get involved — but even then, you do generally (at least, if prosocial societal goals are given sufficient precedence) see societies tend to impose some kind of either age limits or mandatory mentor or religious process onto intoxicants with regard to however they define ‘minors’, so that teenagers have to work for it, can be statistically discouraged en masse without tripping their biological contrarian responses, can be chaperoned by wiser adults, etc.
I can construct many possible theories that underlie your claim but it would be rude for me to put words in your mouth and then reply to them. You’re welcome to offer an explanation if you’d like a second try. Though, I wouldn’t reply to ‘regulation has a special label at this one prohibitive extreme in specific’, which may save you a followup at least!
You can’t regulate the quality of things you don’t produce (or allow to be produced). You can’t regulate the sales of things you don’t sell (or allow to be sold).
>Quick doctors appointment every 6-12 months on an opt in basis - just a check up to make sure you are partaking responsibly.
I'm in a medical state that does this and it's just hilariously corrupt. That checkup to ensure responsibility is nothing more than a drug fee. There is nothing to it beyond a phone call where they ask you if you still want to be certified and you say "yes".
Even within the last ten years, in California, we were visiting. Went to a store. "Oh, we only sell medical", "Oh, sorry to bother you". They hand us a business card. "Just go outside the store, call this number, and they'll get your info, give them your card number (I want to say it was like $20?) then you can come back inside and will show up in our database.
"Do you have anxiety or trouble sleeping and do you think marijuana would help you with this?" "Yes I do." "Sounds good to me."
> Quick doctors appointment every 6-12 months on an opt in basis - just a check up to make sure you are partaking responsibly.
What would irresponsible partaking look like, and would doctors be able to actually detect it?
Nearly every prescription I've ever received has been pretty lax, with the only exception being one psychiatrist who prescribed me ADD medication - but only after I had both an EKG and an ECG done. Everyone else just asked me a few questions, and filled out the prescription.
Minor nit, but ECG and EKG are synonyms - the K is used because it is less likely to be confused verbally or in a written order... perhaps you mean EEG?
You know what, you're almost certainly right. One was a check to make sure my heart was ok, and the other one was a check to make sure my brain was ok.
What are you talking about. A. those systems don't make sure you partake responsibly, you even admit it yourself with the claim that legalization reduced popularity. and B. it's like so so so much better than alcohol or tobacco. Are you seriously suggesting that's where the bar should be for government regulation?
All drugs should be legal and we should have good programs to take care of you if you fuck up their use, it would be vastly cheaper and better for society than criminalization, especially if your claims about legalization reducing use are true.
I think part of the issue people are missing is what the late Randy Pausch would call a “head fake”. My specific autism is not privacy, digital security, none of that. So I will be honest about my gaps. But from my little corner what this is about is geopolitics - specifically a potential war with China. If you zoom out to the macro level first understand the reason China setup the Great Firewall. Why countries like Iran cut the internet whenever there are protests. These are, first and foremost, defensive measures against foreign influence. America is subject to these same outside forces. The difference is that our free and open society makes things like "a Great Firewall" simply unpalatable to the American people. And rightly so. But it is also becoming increasingly evident that these malign actors are using our own values against us.
Russia for example aims to sow discord. One classic example is the Black Lives Matter movement. This was not a Russian disinformation campaign - but they did propagate views that exist outside the bell curve of the moderate. They push scenes of cops being under siege for the right and racist policing for the left. They amplify the voices of the most angry, the most extreme and the most radical on both sides of the spectrum to create confusion, distrust and societal division.
China by comparison takes a much more subtle view. They choose to erode what they call "civilizational confidence" by highlighting systemic failures, inconvenient truths, or otherwise undermine institutional credibility. When you read an article and find a moderating factor buried in the last paragraph that is the flavor of Chinese action. The general malaise about American exceptionalism failing and China's inevitable ascent stems from their work. Rather than pure division they aim to emotionally exhaust you into "acquiescence from inevitability".
There is hardly a nation on the earth that is not involved in some way in the American discourse - each pushing and pulling to their own aims and individual agenda. Historically there was a sort of Nash equilibrium with Americans caught somewhere in the center. But as the loudest voices, or rather the most well funded, begin to dominate the discussion via social media and covert funding, we are seeing it become increasingly problematic for American democracy. That is why you are starting to see this consensus over 'verification' and 'identification' begin to coalesce. The government, both left and right of center, has begun to realize the long term ramifications of these actors.
So how do you solve that inherent tension between our intrinsic right to free-speech and those who would abuse it to cause us actual harm? An independent, 3rd party verifier with limited scope makes sense - but would that solve the greater geopolitical implications? In truth I've long expected social media like Reddit, Facebook, et al. to formulate a body of their own like the MPAA. But likewise I don't think there is a clear answer here. Do you trust the Tech Oligarchs with this power over the Government itself? This is core to the problem. How do you 'censor' the internet without really 'censoring' Americans? I think this is part of what the last administration was trying to do with the failed "Disinformation Governance Board". And that failure is what has led us to where we are now.
The original twitter thread is right to say this isn't a left-versus-right issue. This is undeniably a censorship mechanism designed to exclude a set of voices from the internet as we know it today. As with the patriot act, they choose to wrap the bitter pill in a bacon-flavored rhetoric of safety and protecting the youth from perverts and degenerates. But what has failed to be acknowledged is the intrinsic cost of having an open society in a world where that openness has become an attack surface. Make no mistake: the goal is censorship. But the solution space to what you call 'the nominal problem' is less trivial than I think you believe.
Agree with all of this. It's fascinating how social media is this soup of the most virulent propaganda imaginable for every possible interest. It's a FFA between all these different powers and you are just trying to keep up with friends and watch cat videos. That they are targeting the current largest empire makes a lot of sense.
I think at an individual level the best thing to do is to opt out of this stuff and not use these corporate systems with algorithmic feeds. Only those will have the intrusive age verification anyway.
> Russia for example aims to sow discord. One classic example is the Black Lives Matter movement. This was not a Russian disinformation campaign - but they did propagate views that exist outside the bell curve of the moderate. They push scenes of cops being under siege for the right and racist policing for the left. They amplify the voices of the most angry, the most extreme and the most radical on both sides of the spectrum to create confusion, distrust and societal division.
> China by comparison takes a much more subtle view. They choose to erode what they call "civilizational confidence" by highlighting systemic failures, inconvenient truths, or otherwise undermine institutional credibility. When you read an article and find a moderating factor buried in the last paragraph that is the flavor of Chinese action. The general malaise about American exceptionalism failing and China's inevitable ascent stems from their work. Rather than pure division they aim to emotionally exhaust you into "acquiescence from inevitability".
The only reason these approaches work is because there is generally a lot of truth in the things they push and a complete lack of transparency on that reality from powerful Americans, both government and oligarchy. If it wasn't "a lot of truth with some bullshit mixed in" but "only bullshit", it wouldn't work. If the state of the US hadn't made the bullshit realistic and plausible, it wouldn't work.
Those are the issues to fix. You name the PATRIOT Act, yet another thing that has caused much more harm than benefit.
> China by comparison takes a much more subtle view. They choose to erode what they call "civilizational confidence" by highlighting systemic failures, inconvenient truths, or otherwise undermine institutional credibility. When you read an article and find a moderating factor buried in the last paragraph that is the flavor of Chinese action. The general malaise about American exceptionalism failing and China's inevitable ascent stems from their work. Rather than pure division they aim to emotionally exhaust you into "acquiescence from inevitability".
They mostly bring light to the worst things that happen in the US, which would otherwise go underreported because the people suffering them have no power and the media is already entirely controlled by Bezos et al.
It's laughable to defend this on the basis of foreign influence. The bad actor influencers are inside the house. They're called Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch, and so on. And the information they spread isn't any more truthful or beneficial than that spread by the likes of China.
Rupert Murdoch has done more for misinformation, polarization and extremism over the last 2 decades than China and Russia combined. He's foreign, by the way.
