Viewing profile — idlehand

This has been a line of argument from every Luddite since the start of the industrial revolution. But it is not true. Almost all the productivity gains of the last 250 years have b…

Now we are in Ship of Theseus territory. If I downsample an image and convert it into a tiny delta in the model weights, from which the original image can never be recovered, is th…

These AI models are closer to Google in that regard, yes, you can instruct them to generate a Mickey Mouse image, but you can instruct them to generate any kind of image, just like…

Facebook is a walled garden, but Twitter is indexable and searchable. It has become a megaphone for celebrities, companies, individuals, and institutions.

Potatoes are a brilliant food. They're filling, contain an appropriate amount of calories, a lot of nutrients and a lot of potassium which helps balance out all that salt we're eat…

The US military budget is ~3.5% of GDP. It makes up about 10% of all government spending. 90% of your tax money does not go to war machines.

Nicotine is associated with considerable adverse effects on cardiovascular health. Caffeine has not been found to have any long-term effects on cardiovascular health.

Working hard implies the labor theory of value, which is that all work is interchangeable. While that might have been closer to the truth during the first industrial revolution, th…

Indeed, gas stations would probably love if all cars were electric. When you stop to charge, you know that you will be stopping for at least 15 minutes, so why not get a cup of cof…

AI-generated stories also do not necessarily displace parent-child storytelling, but probably other activities with similar (non-)levels of parental involvement, such as iPad or TV…

It's an interesting world we live in where Apple is the choice for performance. For years and years everyone talked about how Macs were underpowered compared to their price tag.

Using a limited palette has been a point of friction in Blender, too. You can't update the palette from within Blender, and you need to use tiny UV coordinates.

I think a higher rate of miscarriages also limits post-30s fertility for many women. A miscarriage is at least one and often multiple months of time lost, while the clock is tickin…

My wife and I plan to have all our kids before 30. We're doing well above average financially, and we want to be young while our kids are young. She is currently pregnant with our …

Something I like about some newer web frameworks like Next.js is that stylesheets are component-scope by default. This means that any stylesheet I use is inevitably going to affect…

I have a handy little mnemonic I use to keep track of the order of X and Y: the standard "margin: 0 auto" for horizontal centering. 0 vertical margin when centering horizontally, s…

Most people have working lives spanning decades, so maximizing the output of any one month is generally counterproductive. However, if you have a well-rested, happy and productive …

Absolutely right. Unfortunately, this won't come to pass. Housing is the one point of leverage my parents generation have over my generation. It will be the leverage of my generati…

Immigrants still revert to native sub-fertility after a generation, or two at most. Immigration may be a solution for countries in the Anglosphere, as there are countless educated …

For example, a group such as Hispanic voters can be slowly growing over decades as a result of higher fertility. But their voting patterns may change from one election cycle to ano…

Half the Swedish population lives in apartments, but 70% of the children live in houses. As our cities grow larger, chasing higher concentration and productivity, the costs of owni…

Unfortunately it seems that cultural aspects like accepting homosexuality, allowing women to run their own lives and valuing higher education and a scientific mindset are correlate…

Cities have been places where people come to work, live, and die without continuing their line for millennia. Cities generally vote Democrat, but minorities do too and they have hi…

Most companies have a swag budget anyway, getting to pick which items you like is an improvement.

The EU isn't quite there yet, see the issues with refund processing times during covid for an example. I heard some official talking about how airlines shouldn't be allowed to char…