idlehand

9 ms·

1.
by idlehand 4y ago
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 been dispersed into the population. A few early movers have m
2.
by idlehand 4y ago
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 that infringement?
3.
by idlehand 4y ago
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 you can search for anything on Google, including Mickey Mou
4.
by idlehand 4y ago
Facebook is a walled garden, but Twitter is indexable and searchable. It has become a megaphone for celebrities, companies, individuals, and institutions.
5.
by idlehand 4y ago
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 eating.
6.
by idlehand 4y ago
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.
7.
by idlehand 4y ago
Nicotine is associated with considerable adverse effects on cardiovascular health. Caffeine has not been found to have any long-term effects on cardiovascular health.
8.
by idlehand 4y ago
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, the variability in the value of labor has never been higher th
9.
by idlehand 4y ago
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 coffee and a snack while waiting? If we're lucky, gas stat
10.
by idlehand 4y ago
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 time.
11.
by idlehand 4y ago
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.
12.
by idlehand 4y ago
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.
13.
by idlehand 4y ago
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 ticking.
14.
by idlehand 4y ago
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 first. It helps that she is not very career-minded, I h
15.
by idlehand 4y ago
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, at most, one React component. And so I can call every actu
16.
by idlehand 4y ago
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, so Y must be the first axis.
17.
by idlehand 4y ago
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 team that has adequate time for leisure and recreation, you
18.
by idlehand 4y ago
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 generation over my children's generation. By keeping homes
19.
by idlehand 4y ago
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 English speakers who want to immigrate. Countries in the res
20.
by idlehand 4y ago
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 another. Hispanic voters are not so solidly Democrat as they ha
21.
by idlehand 4y ago
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 owning a house within reasonable commuting distance soar. So ins
22.
by idlehand 4y ago
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 correlated with not prioritizing the reproduction of their culture to
23.
by idlehand 4y ago
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 higher fertility than rural whites, who are predominantly Repu
24.
by idlehand 4y ago
Most companies have a swag budget anyway, getting to pick which items you like is an improvement.
25.
by idlehand 4y ago
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 charge you until you step on the plane, which sounds l
26.
by idlehand 4y ago
Many cities grow by adding more suburban areas. It's a very land-intensive way to grow, but popular among families as they don't have to live in apartments.
27.
by idlehand 4y ago
More importantly, the countries with high birth rates do not have enough human capital to replace aging Westerners. Their kids aren't equipped to take the millions of vacant Western jobs, because they won't have the necessary educ
28.
by idlehand 4y ago
Most importantly you communicate to investors that your government does not respect the pricing mechanism of the market. That'll make investors worried about which other norms of economic stewardship your regime will violate. The uncer
29.
by idlehand 4y ago
Looking at the global median income and coloring it with the mean revenue per user paints an incorrect picture. Advertisers are not paying even $35/yr for the attention of people making the global median wage. US attention is the most
30.
by idlehand 4y ago
Would be neat to have ligatures, for example for lowercase i followed by space, to restore column alignment.

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