Viewing profile — ianferrel

For the cost of sending one human there for a week, we could send thousands of robots there for years. There is no way that human space exploration is ever cost effective with robo…

Why is the path curved at the start?

Mismanaged monoculture forests are one of the first examples of states seeking simplified legible solutions to managing complex ecosystems in Seeing Like a State.

It hasn't happened in this case. Your example has causality reversed. Khamenei wasn't killed because there was a prediction market about the political leadership of Iran.

>there can be no interstate market in a substance that is illegal to trade. There is in fact an interstate market in many substances that are illegal to trade because laws against …

Or he cares more about promulgating the philosophy of cryptoanarchism than he does about his personal enrichment or safety. Most attempts to analyze what Satoshi would do suffer fr…

The thing is, most of the people heavily involved in early Bitcoin are fairly characterized as cryptoanarchists, a group strongly devoted to the principle of privacy and liberty ef…

>Because agentic AI can parse unstructured data and make purchasing decisions regardless of whether your site allows it, which avoids the chicken-and-egg problem. People can do tha…

>The marketplace that builds "agent-friendly" commerce (verified listings, structured data, transparent pricing, API access) becomes the default backend for AI shopping. I'd like t…

That's 4 ounces of beef, not meat. I eat plenty of meat, but eat beef less than once a week.

This kind of phrasing has been common in writing long before AI. There's a reason that AI picked it up—it's a natural human written speech pattern.

I remembered a third one: 3. It won't reliably play music anymore! I have a good set of songs in my iPhone's Apple Music library. When I say "Hey siri, play ", it asks me for acces…

Rigid whiskers have other sets of problems. Below someone mentioned that rigid whiskers will break when they contact objects. If the whisker is as rigid as the drone itself, it pla…

Thin lightweight whiskers are going to be challenging to manage on a propeller-driven vehicle. They'll get blown all over the place. Having them extend out past the propellers will…

Honestly, my experience with Siri is that it works worse than it did 10 years ago. It's not clear to me if that's with Siri itself or just the general decrease in quality of Apple …

How many phones do you get for that? My family has two phone lines for $50/mo, plus we buy two ~2 year old iPhones every 3-4 years, which adds maybe another $20/mo average to the c…

Sure, it is going up. For now. And the die-hards will put up with just about anything. But not everyone is a diehard. On the margin, people who might have watched the game some nig…

>Everyone benefits from it except the consumer, who's the only party who can't choose. But of course they can choose. They can choose to not go to those events and venues and do ot…

It feels like the recipient company did an awful lot of work in response to what was at best a fishing expedition. A serious complaint about licensing that demanded a real response…

What if the company that is about to go bankrupt fails to pay its insurance premiums? Seems fairly likely to happen. About-to-be-bankrupt companies generally get behind on all thei…

This is what happens when you wish on a monkey's paw to get rid of pennies.

Presumably "increase the price a small amount to avoid giving exact change" is exactly the sort of thing that laws requiring giving exact change were designed to prevent. There wil…

I live where there is no sales tax, so it's not hard to imagine! But good luck convincing every state, county, municipality, and other weird governing body that requires something …

There's a lot of physical infrastructure that works with quarters, and it's probably not worth giving that up for slightly improved coinage. Just drop all the coins smaller than a …

Setting prices to avoid the need for pennies is probably technically challenging given the combination of requirements to post prices and sales taxes that don't always round the sa…