I'm reminded of the famous story of (I think) the central beam in a building at Oxford. The story goes something like: The central beam was beginning to fail and the Oxford administration knew they needed to replace it. When they went around for quotes, no one could replace the beam because it was 100 ft in length and sourced from an old growth tree. Such logs were simply unavailable to buy. To solve the issue, the s…
Slow
31–40 of 238 posts
Re: Slow
#32I guess tomorow's front page top article will be called "Steady" ?
Re: Slow
#33The 2nd Ave Subway in Manhattan, with preparatory construction beginning in 1942. First phase opened in 2017. Although the outcome should be celebrated, the slowness and the added costs that brings certainly should not be. While every project is unique, it is not immediately clear why digging a subway on the Upper East Side is twenty times more expensive than in Seoul or ten times more expensive than in Paris. https:…
Super enjoyed this read today. And a much shorter punchline. https://www.volts.wtf/p/us-transit-costs-and-how-to-tame
https://bsky.app/profile/volts.wtf/post/3lvbpy6p2zk2c
It's just so sad having a nation where disbelief & being against things is so the spirit.
Re: Slow
#34This reminded me of an old comic or meme about people’s expectations about science that went like:
Protester: What do we want??
Crowd: High quality, double blinded, N of 100000, 20 year longitudinal, preregistered studies!!
Protester: When do we want it??
Crowd: Now!!!
Re: Slow
#35Figuring out a good reason to colonize the solar system
An optimal manufacturing and logistics network for the solar system
Inventing replicators and dispensing with capitalism
Re: Slow
#36In my free time, I have taken to trying to prove the Collatz conjecture. People much smarter and more educated than me have failed at this quest, so I will nearly certainly fail at it, but that's not really the point in my mind. Even if I'm not the one to actually prove it, I can at least try and contribute to the body of work towards proving it. Mathematics is, more than nearly anything else, the result of generatio…
A related thing occurs in academia for very niche topics on which only very few people are working. Perhaps nobody for most of the time. A paper might "reply" to another paper from years or decades ago, and receive itself a reply only years later, but from a different author.
The cool thing is that you can easily become the current world leading expert on such a niche topic, because there aren't that many papers. So it's easy to know every single one of them, and the few experts are spread out in time rather than space.
It's like a web forum thread on a very obscure question, where only every few years someone contributes a new comment, likely never to be read by most of the previous authors, but read by all that come later.
Re: Slow
#37Cool list, but to be a party pooper: > Will Unix Time or TCP/IP ever be replaced? Modified: sure. UNIX time is already being replaced with a 64 bit value instead of signed 32 bit. TCP/IP has already been replaced, that's QUIC over IPv6 which is what my computer uses every time it connects to Google. I mean you can claim IPv6 is still "IP" because it shares the same first two letters, but IPv6 is different enough to b…
From TFA:
> Modified: sure.
Fundamentally, IPv6 and 64 bit UNIX time are modifications of their predecessors. QUIC not so much, but it's still a long way from replacing TCP on the web, let alone the internet.
Re: Slow
#38Cool list, but to be a party pooper: > Will Unix Time or TCP/IP ever be replaced? Modified: sure. UNIX time is already being replaced with a 64 bit value instead of signed 32 bit. TCP/IP has already been replaced, that's QUIC over IPv6 which is what my computer uses every time it connects to Google. I mean you can claim IPv6 is still "IP" because it shares the same first two letters, but IPv6 is different enough to b…
> QUIC over IPv6 which is what my computer uses every time it connects to Google.
You don't have to adopt everything Google tells you to adopt, you know...
Re: Slow
#39In my free time, I have taken to trying to prove the Collatz conjecture. People much smarter and more educated than me have failed at this quest, so I will nearly certainly fail at it, but that's not really the point in my mind. Even if I'm not the one to actually prove it, I can at least try and contribute to the body of work towards proving it. Mathematics is, more than nearly anything else, the result of generatio…
Reminds me of Stewart Brand and the Clock of the Long Now (and other longer time horizon projects they are working on).
Reminds me of a statement he made during a Tim Ferris interview that I think is quite profound for our mental health. ".... being proud is the most reliable source of happiness that I know."
Re: Slow
#40I dunno. I think we should separate out the stuff that fundamentally has to take a long time, like the pitch experiment, from stuff like Notre Dame, which just took a long time because they lacked the resources to do it all at once. Like OK, it takes a long time to build a big church because you need to find all the right rocks or whatever. But the pitch, that’s the universe taking a long time to tell us something. (…
When they started building cathedrals they knew they weren't going to see it finished. They did it anyway. That's the point.