I really like this advice. When I'm sad I don't want to leave the house, and certainly won't have the motivation to do much exercise on my own. But having friends peer-pressure me into making good choices would (and has) helped a lot.
I think it's a good rule of thumb. When they send robots into something like the Fukushima site they don't last long.
My first take is that I'm not surprised from a fermi problem standpoint that you can destroy two computers made from small parts smashed by radiation with a similar dose. But maybe that intuition is wrong because your brain could survive losing a few neurons but a microchip could be 0% functional after losing one transistor. My rule of thumb is about right for conventional chips but you can certainly get rad-hard chips that hold up better:
I basically have never actively sought out World News, and just find out "through osmosis" by talking to friends or hearing about things coincidentally. Then I go google specific events that interest me. I find that most immediate reporting is unclear anyways, and adding 2-3 months of hindsight generally results in more facts and less speculation. I think this has worked really well for me. If the world goes to shit within 3 months I think I will notice even without reading the news.
I'm not sure if this strategy can generalize to the entire population, since I am relying on my friends to mention events to me.
I guess the counter-argument is that the world is slowly going to shit and it's only by paying attention and getting involved that we can prevent that. But I don't think that justifies daily news reading.
Much news is biased towards specific political PoVs so that if you’re not aligned with those views, it can be frustrating to hear the same opinions, day after day, on matters that should be solved differently.
It takes a lot to move the needle, and I can understand anyone who simply doesn’t have the energy.
And then other folks ignore international law and simply do whatever they want, while others look on or pay the matter only lip-service.
Wow this is exciting. I tend liberal, but I think this sounds like a bad policy lol. My understanding of the existing research is that rent control tends to decreases the motivation to increase supply, and I think this should do the same
Yeah if investors are no longer buying from home developers then it'll definitely limit the demand, the price homes sell for, and the motivation to build new homes. I believe that metropolitan areas are the problem and my unpopular opinion is that people have to get used to the idea of moving to sparser areas for affordable housing.
More specifically, the current zoning of metropolitan areas is the problem. US cities have plenty of potential for more housing, they just won't allow it to be built.
The most absurd example is here in SF, where... okay, context. A recently-passed state law overriding local zoning means that there's a high-rise building project in the Marina district (https://sfyimby.com/2025/12/preliminary-permits-filed-for-fo...) that will almost certainly get built, despite people endlessly protesting it. It will add 790 apartments, 86 of which will be required to be affordable housing.
Before this, in 2024, there were 7 net housing units added for the entire year in the Marina District. No typo there, literally just 7, in the most expensive neighborhood in the city, in the most expensive city in the country.
This one building, only possible because the state overrode local zoning, will be adding by itself more than 100 years worth of new housing to the neighborhood. That's how fucked the approval process is.
To be fair you’re not really providing a hard stance against the estimate. You say it is unlikely, and indeed the prediction is a 3% chance. That’s unlikely.
>To maintain the integrity & not override the memories associated with specific songs, I rarely listen to or re-save songs from the past years. Sometimes I give myself exceptions, though, especially with remixes. ;)
I listen to music as a form of enjoyment, and I can't imagine restricting the music I listen to arbitrarily, for seemingly no gain. To each their own, but it's hard for me to understand how this is making the author happy.
I can sort of understand this. There are certain songs, eg. a song from my wedding, that hit like a (good) ton of bricks every time I hear them, but I wouldn't want to listen to it every day because I feel like I would have more and more banal experiences cumulatively associating with the song until the wedding feeling becomes just one of many and starts to lose its association.
> The reason this library was initially written was to optimise the layout of inflatable space habitats which may one day be constructed on the Moon and Mars.
Hot take: Musk is a great CEO. He's a horrible person, but I feel it's undeniable that his weight behind a project greatly increases the chance of interesting and profitable things happening (despite the over-optimistic claims and missed deadlines). I think he achieves this in large part _because_ he is an asshole, tweeting all the time to drum up publicity, being notorious for doing K, being too optimistic about what can be achieved, etc. I think somebody can be a good CEO without being such a jerk, it's just that Musk doesn't take the good-person strategy. And the bad-person strategy works well for him.
A CEO's job is (roughly) to maximize a company's valuation. It is not to run the company themselves, not to be nice, not to improve the world. I'm not claiming this is what _should_ be, just how it _is_. By this metric, I think Musk has done really well in his role.
Edit: Tangentially related -- at the end of the musical "Hadestown", the cast raise their glasses to the audience and toast "to the world we dream about, and the one we live in today." I think about that a lot. It's so beautiful, helps enforce some realism on me, and makes me think about what I want to change with my life.
The first part works because otherwise reusable rockets wouldn't have been invented (or maybe they'd have been invented 20 years later). It's the same as Steve Jobs, the Android guys were still making prototypes with keyboards until they saw the all screen interface of the iPhone. Sometimes it requires a single individual pushing their will through an organization to get things done, and sometimes that requires lying.
It did, and it needed a direction to be pushed towards. Are you familiar with the great man theory of history [0]? It is no different here (well, historians these days use a blend of great man theory and historical materialism as you're stating in your example, as no one theory explains the majority of historical changes).
> The first part works because otherwise reusable rockets wouldn't have been invented (or maybe they'd have been invented 20 years later).
I do not want to take credit away from SpaceX in what they achieved. It sure is complex. But it's also possible to give someone excess credit by denying others what is due. I don't know which part of 'reusable rockets' you are talking about, whether it's the reusable engines and hardware or if it's the VTOL technology. But none of that was 'invented' by SpaceX. NASA had been doing that for decades before that, but never had enough funding to get it all together. Talking about reusable hardware and engines, the Space Shuttle Orbiter is an obvious example - the manned upper stage of a rocket that entered orbit and was reused multiple times for decades. SpaceX doesn't yet have an upper stage that has done that. The only starship among the 9 to even survive the reentry never entered orbit in the first place. Now comes the 'reusable engine'. Do you need a better example than the RS-25/SSME of the same orbiter? Now let's talk about VTOL rockets. Wasn't Apollo LMs able to land and takeoff vertically in the 1960s itself? NASA also had a 'Delta Clipper' experiment in the 1990s that did more or less the same thing as SpaceX grasshopper and Starship SN15 - 'propulsive hops', multiple times. Another innovation at SpaceX is the full-flow stage combustion cycle used in the Raptor engine. To date, it is the only FF-SCC engine to have operated in space. But both NASA and USSR had tested these things on the ground. Similarly, Starship's silica heat tiles are entirely of NASA heritage - something they never seem to mention in their live telecasts.
I see people berating NASA while comparing them with SpaceX. How much of a coincidence is it that the technologies used by SpaceX are something under NASA's expertise? The real engineers at SpaceX wouldn't deny those links. Many of them were veterans who worked with NASA to develop them. And that's fine. But it's very uncharitable to not credit NASA at all. The real important question right now is, how many of those veterans are left at SpaceX, improving these things? Meanwhile unlike SpaceX, NASA didn't keep getting government contracts, no matter how many times they failed. NASA would find their funding cut every time they looked like they achieved something.
> It's the same as Steve Jobs, the Android guys were still making prototypes with keyboards until they saw the all screen interface of the iPhone.
Two things that cannot be denied about Steve Jobs is that he had an impeccable aesthetic sense and an larger-than-life image needed to market his products. But nothing seen in the iPhone was new even in 2007. Full capacitive touch screens, multi-touch technology, etc were already in the market in some niche devices like PDAs. The technology wasn't advanced enough back then to bring it all together. Steve Jobs had the team and the resources needed to do it for the first times. But he didn't invent any of those. Again, this is not to take away the credit from Jobs for his leadership.
> Sometimes it requires a single individual pushing their will through an organization to get things done, and sometimes that requires lying.
This is the part I have a problem with. All the work done by the others are just neglected. All the damages done by these people are also neglected. You have no idea how many new ideas from their rivals they drive into oblivion, so as to retain their image. Leaders are a cog in the machine - just like everyone else working with him to generate the value. But this sort of hero worship by neglecting everyone else and their transgressions is a net negative for human race. They aren't some sort of divine magical beings.
lol what, this is insane, we don't live in 1984
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