This is true if the milk is in the fridge the whole time. With the milk out the whole time, it's nearly the same, exact answer depends on the geometry of both containers.
He's definitely conflating two things: watches changed from utilities to fashion items, and watchmakers changed from engineering to branding. In this example, the one change caused the other, but it's just one example. It's no excuse to paint all of branding with the same brush and ignore how, say, Milwaukee's branding provides a valuable signal of real utility.
I think it's tempting to be equally dismissive of branding and fashion because they are both forms of virtue signaling and therefore have all its perversions. However, they're operating on different actors. Branding is virtue signaling by companies to its customers. Fashion is virtue signaling by customers to other people.
One big annoyance with the power-ups is that the failure condition is checked before you can use them. It's particularly painful since they all replace the current piece, so they seem tailor-made to get rid of a nasty piece that would cause you to lose... but then they have to be used before you get to that piece that would cause you to lose!
Anyway, both times I played I got in the 40s without any power-ups used, then saw that the next piece would cause me to lose but none of the powers could save me. Probably the ideal fix is just to not trigger a loss while you still have powers?
No, their Responsible Scaling Policy and their government contract are not related. The RSP governs how Anthropic itself behaves w/r/t developing, testing, and releasing new models. The contract was signed with stipulations around how the government can use existing models (No mass surveillance, no military targeting without a human in the loop) which Hegseth wants removed in a standoff that hasn't yet resolved.
One difference is the very real possibility that AI will not just be a "tool for humanity", but a collection of actors with real power and goals. Robert Miles has an approachable explanation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zATXsGm_xJo
Not sure this is necessarily for faster growth. Riding out the AI bubble's rise and/or its bursting will each present a lot of need for capital and a lot of barriers to raising it. They're not an AI company but they obviously have tons of exposure across the stack to these markets. They may simply be making the call that this is a better time to be raising money than the years to come.
Security is a classic example of a public good where this doesn't work well. The cheapest ways to secure an airport (sharing queues, staff, protocols, machines, training, threat models) are going to also benefit those who opt out, creating a tragedy of the commons.
Loving the blog in both style and content, hope to have time to read more in the future!
A random note in case Non-Zero-Sum James is looking: It's frustrating that reading footnotes[0] requires scrolling back and finding your previous place. A link from the footnote back to the original place in the text or something that reveals a footnote in-place (e.g. on hover) is fairly universal and very helpful!
Thanks unholiness—fair point on the footnotes, I'll put that on my to-do list. As you can see, it's all very hand-made, so some of those basics are missed sometimes.
The reasonable things that continue happening each day in our universe would be extremely unlikely if we are just Boltzman brains. Every bit of sensible reality would be coincidental. The very continuance of that reality is an experiment constant proving the falsehood of Boltzman brains, at a rate of oh maybe millions of sigmas of confidence per second.
Now, if you believe the universe came to an initial state due to pure thermodynamic coincidence, millions of sigmas per second is laughably small compared to the chance that a whole universe outside your brain popped into existence, so Boltzman brains are the most believable thing and you should believe in them.
This completes a pretty direct argument: Believing the initial state of the universe was a thermodynamic coincidence forces you to believe in Boltzman brains, Boltzman brains force you to believe reality should collapse immediately, and reality does not collapse immediately. Therefore you simply can't believe the first assumption, that initial state of the universe was a thermodynamic coincidence.
Accepting this is often called the "Past Hypothesis". It's spoken of in deferential terms and said that it can't ever be proven... But to me this is rock-solid proof, with more sigmas of evidence than any other scientific discovery and increasing by the second! Can't we just call it the Past Theorem already?
How do you know that reality does not collapse immediately? At any given instant you could be a fresh brain that just came into existence, all your previous memories which imply a life lived up to this point also formed in that same instant.
Indeed the bigger issue as I see it is that the only "sensible reality" that can exist is the one you subjectively experience. Since that one is the only sensible one, it's the only one you perceptually would be able to hang around for - even if it's actually a conincidental series of flickers of sapience across trillions and trillions of years.
i.e. a time stepped simulation, absent external reference, doesn't know how long it's been between the actual steps - could be seconds, could be hours, could be years.
EDIT: Like the real issue with "death" is that it's not "eons on darkness" - which is why I think people get afraid of it (or one of the reasons) - but that actual, literal non-existence is inconceivable even though we all did it - 13 billion years of not-existing in the universe, then suddenly you.
So after you die the same problem re-emerges: the conscious experience of "you" ends...but then from the subjective blink of an eye if something happens to restart that information process just right, suddenly again, you - and it has to be you, and no one else, because if it wasn't then well, it would be someone else - i.e. why am I me, and not my wife or son for example?
What if it was someone who just happened to be extremely similar to you? There's a decent probability that someone extremely similar to you will come into existence during the finite lifespan of the universe. Would that person be likely to be "you"? By comparison, would they be more "you" than a version of yourself that woke up with brain damage?
The point is that you, dear reader, could be the Boltzmann Brain, and that would mean that all your memories spontaneously came into being, giving you the illusion of a past history, and it would also mean that you will dissipate again shortly after; there is no continuity, and we're not all BBs. 'We' are all just figments of your imaginary imagination, conjured momentarily into memory and then lost again.
For a Boltzmann brain there is no real past or future - your reality does indeed collapse immediately and you'll never know it; the idea that 'reality doesn't collapse immediately' is not a verifiable fact, because the only evidence you have to the contrary is encoded in and perceived by your brain...
If you are a Boltzman brain then you are born with memories you have (that haven't really happened) and you have no future (because the next moment you'll collapse).
You could even live kind of a "life" by randomly popping into existence once every million years in some differrent galaxy, experiencing one planck time and collapsing (and the only thing that connects the instances to each other is that the next instance by random chance has memories consistent with the previous instance).
They could even appear in non-chronological order.
I don't think it's likely, but it's more likely than having the one randomly generated brain experience stuff "in real time".
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