If this were to take effect with the bulk of social life taking place digitally we can expect minimum voting ages to be decreased the same and in the case of the US, the age of consent for sex to be standardized in the same direction too with a deemphasis on 18 as the de facto minimum at the cultural level.
And we can expect 15 year olds to hit the workforce full-time around then too I reckon. Or younger. Imagine 9 year olds stowed away in Waymo taxi trunks with socket wrenches and cyberdecks.
This morning I was wondering what happened to whatever arrangement I thought Apple had with OpenAI. In a way I think OpenAI is a competitor and “new money”. Pairing with Google makes sense especially considering that this is “normie-facing” technology. And from what I recall, a lot of Apple fans prefer “Hey Google” in their cars over CarPlay. Or something to that effect.
This reads like an overreaction. I think both OpenAI and Anthropic are soon to settle upon their target markets; that each of them are attracting separate crowds/types of coders and that the people already sold on Claude Code don’t care about this decision.
I won’t take Meta’s new ambitions serious unless Zuckerberg does something like have a “fireside chat” next to Ezra Klein moderated by Kara Swisher where he awkwardly spams the word “abundance” while staring Klein square in the brow. And then buys Vox Media.
I don’t like this product as a service to readers (i.e., people who read as a cognitive/philosophical exploit) but I do think that somewhere embedded in its backend there are things of benefit.
I think that this sucks the discreet joy out of reading and learning. Having the ways that the topics within a certain book can cross over in lead into another book of a different topic externalized is hollowing and I don’t find it useful.
On the other hand I feel like seeing this process externalized gives us a glimpse at how “the algorithms” (read: recommender systems) suggest seemingly disjunctive content to users. So as a technical achievement I can’t knock what you’ve done and I’m satisfied to see that you’re the guy behind the HN Book map that I thought was nice too.
At its core this looks like a representation of the advantages that LLMs can afford to the humanities. Most of us know how Rob Pike feels about them. I wonder if his senior former colleague feels the same: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/hum307/index.html. That’s a digression, but I’d like to see some people think in public about how to reasonably use these tools in that domain.
> Having the ways that the topics within a certain book can cross over in lead into another book of a different topic externalized is hollowing and I don’t find it useful.
Intuitively, I agree. This feels like the different between being a creator (of your own thoughts as inspired by another person's) and a consumer (although in a somewhat educational sense). There would need to be a big advantage to being taught those initial thoughts, analogous to why we teach folks algebra/calculus via formulas rather than having every student figure out proofs for themselves.
I’ve started to determine the right package of paper towels to purchase according to the cents per square meter value. You can discern the quality of a deal at the grocery by referring to the ‘cents per X’ market located on price tag next to the marked price.
I’m beginning to turn sour on the ‘2 Jumbo-Mega-Rolls are the equivalent of 8 Super rolls’ scheme that’s en vogue. Are there retractable roll holders to accommodate for all of this?
It doesn’t help that many of these packages are priced and then marked down in ways to entice the buyer toward purchasing them instead of more reasonably priced and proportioned ones.
With paper towel I have been thinking that the area might not be important, but the number of sheets would be. As long as they do not get too small. And then there is also the quality and if they are half or full. For some uses you just want the full.
It is complicated area. Not to even get to loo roll. Where I noticed that the ecological one I bought feels quality wise inferior to normal one. And this is premium type of stuff. So it sits between the premium and cheap, but more on premium end.
Although that doesn’t speak to the actual quality of the individual layers of paper. I’m not sure if weight is useful especially when manufacturers are already putting their thumb on the scale in other ways with the ‘2 Jumbo-Mega-Rolls are the equivalent of 8 Super rolls’ scheme that I initially referred to.
If all weight can tell me is that 2-Jumbo-Mega Rolls weigh the same as 8 Super rolls am I any better informed?
This is why I’m pretty content with using the price in cents per square foot as a baseline. In general it’s a useful metric when shopping elsewhere at the grocery store too.
The worst is that the assumption that the greater quantity is cheaper per unit, but for some reason that's not always true so you have to sit there and do the math in order to get the best deal.
The book that this website is inspired by...its plot seems to echo my impression of what these “Old/small web elegies” are becoming.
A man stumbles upon the idea of a thing that itself is borne off the account of someone else that never actually came to pass. Madness ensues. And madness perhaps precedes the event. ‘Weird and eerie’.
And we can expect 15 year olds to hit the workforce full-time around then too I reckon. Or younger. Imagine 9 year olds stowed away in Waymo taxi trunks with socket wrenches and cyberdecks.
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