One lesson to add: Any investment can go to zero, so better size it accordingly.
Mid cap and large cap mutual funds are pretty safe right?
The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life
41–50 of 65 posts
Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life
#42> The easy moral of the story is that Twain was gullible and Paige a huxster. It absolutely isn't. Paige was actually the engineer/tinkerer earnestly developing this machine, which really worked. One of his main problems is that he always thought he needed to improve it more before it was ready. He didn't understand "release early and often": that time-to-market matters. > Twain felt that he had an insider’s perspect…
The wedge-shaped expander bars you mention are a brilliant bit of engineering: they deliver perfectly equal spacing across the entire line without any calculation or measurement needed.
Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life
#43I wish school curriculum included things like "how printing actually worked through ages". Monks writing out manuscripts is somewhat relatable since we all (at least for now) still learn how to write. Everyone is taught the Gutenberg press was a big deal -- but how did it actually work? Why was it still a pain and how did later inventions fix those problems?
Gutenberg's press was made out of a wine press. Letters were cast in lead, then lined up on a tray under the press. The tray was inked. A piece of paper was set over the inked letters, and the wine press forced the paper onto the letters. This cut the cost of a book by a factor of 300(!).
The trouble for Gutenberg was it was too easy to duplicate his press, and that combined with not being good at business led to his bankruptcy.
Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's really awesome! Did they have you try and typeset something by hand? I feel like for us it presented as some magical thing that made producing books trivially easy, whereas in reality typesetting a page was still very labor intensive and not that fast!
The printer setup is where all the cost is, the printing itself is practically free.
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Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life
#45> 3) Transformative technologies succeed by redesigning a task, and usually not by simply trying to reproduce the existing forms of human labor. Paige built an amazingly complex mechanical imitation of the human compositor which attempted to repeat a human worker’s actual movements. By contrast, Linotype simplified the problem by doing something humans didn’t already do. That would in fact be the main argument agains…
Humanoids are the Turing machines of physics.
They're Mediocre at everything, and worse than a dedicated machine at almost every task, just like a CPU is worse than an ASIC. However, they adapt to new tasks quickly. This decreases ownership costs (you only need one humanoid, not one machine per task), as well as manufacturing costs, as you can make one design and spend a lot of R&D money on scaling that design.
Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life
#46Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my school curriculum here in Vienna, this was very specifically taught in history class.
That's really awesome! Did they have you try and typeset something by hand? I feel like for us it presented as some magical thing that made producing books trivially easy, whereas in reality typesetting a page was still very labor intensive and not that fast!
We learned about how the Gutenberg Press physically worked, how it was based on wine presses and how difficult it supposedly was to produce a single metal letter. Also, how it was a PITA to re-arrange them to print something else, alas it was mostly used to print the Bible.
Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life
#48I don't like the first photo, historical photos getting colorized does not feel right to me, as all the colors are just assumptions and the whole thing may have looked different in real and if we look at this photo it sure did
As the caption says, it's not even a real photo of Twain or Paige, it's from a movie.
Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life
#49> 3) Transformative technologies succeed by redesigning a task, and usually not by simply trying to reproduce the existing forms of human labor. Paige built an amazingly complex mechanical imitation of the human compositor which attempted to repeat a human worker’s actual movements. By contrast, Linotype simplified the problem by doing something humans didn’t already do. That would in fact be the main argument agains…
Humanoids are the Turing machines of physics. They're Mediocre at everything, and worse than a dedicated machine at almost every task, just like a CPU is worse than an ASIC. However, they adapt to new tasks quickly. This decreases ownership costs (you only need one humanoid, not one machine per task), as well as manufacturing costs, as you can make one design and spend a lot of R&D money on scaling that design.
There's no reason why an ideal body needs to have such a high center of gravity though? Clearly we are wasting a lot of energy and capacity to maintain that balance.
I am pretty the ideal body is actually a spider.
Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the things school curricula touch turn awful. It's never been easier for you and interested kids to learn these things on their own.
The vast majority of people vastly overestimate how well they learn things without the feedback of formal education. Easier on its own is therefore effectively meaningless when people aren’t actually learning beyond the most superficial layers.
It’s not only feedback, having arbitrary checkpoints like exams is an important motivator, and it also creates a whole culture around it that makes the learning experience into a social one.