The Hawaiian language has a concept called Kaona, which is essentially embedding deeper meanings in contextual word choices. It can go way beyond the literal meaning of the words, and tie into bigger concepts of culture, lineage, and places. It's super cool hearing about it from native speakers.
We don't really do it intentionally in English, at least to the same degree. But there's still a lot of information coded in our word and grammar choices.
you know, I feel like we don't actually do that so much these days. It's simply too likely that the receiving party is going to take you at face value or make up their own deeper meaning.
Take irony / sarcasm / satire. They're pretty dead compared to what they used to be. I can recall a time when just about everything had subtext, but now you kind of have to play it straight. You can't respond to a racist with sarcasm because anyone listening will just think you agree with them.
It's Poe's law across the board. World news brought to you by Not The Onion(tm).
> You can't respond to a racist with sarcasm because anyone listening will just think you agree with them.
You absolutely can, if you are actually dealing with people listening, because sarcasm is signalled with (among other things) tone (the other things include the listeners contextual knowledge of the speaker.)
You can't do it online, in text, where the audience is mostly strangers who would have to actively dig into your history to get any contextual sense of you as a speaker, because text doesn't carry tone, and the other cues are missing, too.
And by “you can’t”, I mean “you absolutely can, but you have to be aware of the limitations of the medium and take care to use the available tools to substitute for the missing signalling channels”.
It's a matter of degree. You're right, of course, but there was a time not so long ago when such things were ubiquitous - even on the internet. Once upon a time, even the darkest corners like 4chan were actually kind of tongue-in-cheek. Then it slowly dawned on everyone that there were a bunch of people there who weren't kidding, and things kind of went to pot.
In a reversal of the aphorism; those were more complex times. I miss them.
It’s not even really a problem of the Internet necessarily; it’s rather a symptom of the growing political divide in Western society. Things are “simple” now because we’ve reached the point where nuanced discussion is pointless. In Europe you can be jailed for going against the Accepted Opinions™, and we’re seeing a rise in politically motivated attacks. There is no logical solution to emotionally backed rhetoric like we’ve seen with the Turtle Island terrorists; you can’t debate ethics with someone who wants you dead.
By their own words they were going to commit terrorism. That, logically, makes them terrorists. They were found, on film, to be making and experimenting with illegal explosives, and they were found to own even more materials. If you have trustworthy evidence that this is all fabrication—evidence that doesn’t exist in your mind—then I’d be more than happy to see it.
And if you’re saying all of this because you agree with them and their actions, at least have the courage to state you support terrorism directly.
> Once upon a time, even the darkest corners like 4chan were actually kind of tongue-in-cheek.
I distinctly remember both the invention of q-anon and the idea of Trump as a presidential candidate happening on 4chan as a we're-all-in-on-it joke, until true believers started showing up and thinking we believed too. Not a joke anymore...
> I distinctly remember both the invention of q-anon and the idea of Trump as a presidential candidate happening on 4chan as a we're-all-in-on-it joke
4chan was created in 2003. Trump's first bid for the Presidency was an attempt at the Reform Party nomination dropped early in the primary season—in 2000, the one cycle when that party had access to federal matching funds but wasn't effectively a vehicle for H. Ross Perot. Another Trump bid was a recurring topic of discussion in serious, if speculative, contexts ever since (and, for that matter, the idea of a Trump presidential run had been even before the first bid, back to the 1980s, as I recall.) It certainly is not an idea that first emerged as a 4chan joke.
You're right, there's absolutely no sarcasm ever seen on the internet or anywhere else. These days if you say something sarcastic they throw you in jail!
In addition to coming so far down in price, it's amazing to me how good the technology has gotten. Batteries that can easily discharge 5C in cold weather, cycle 10000 times, survive harsh conditions with zero maintenance. Panels that last for decades.
Which is why it makes me especially angry that the current US government is throwing away this gift in order to appease a bunch of aging leaders of petro-states. Literally poisoning the world for a 10-15 year giveaway to the richest of the rich.
I take some solace knowing that fossil fuels are now a dead end. And even though certain people are trying to keep the industry going, that end is sooner than ever.
The original stated goal was to 10x the speed of existing tunnel boring machines by bringing up the cutting head RPMs, automating liner installation, and speeding up spoil removal with electric sleds. Which would seem like a good bet, except that there are a million other bottlenecks to the process. On top of that, it doesn't seem like they even solved their core problems.
It would be cool if they'd post a postmortem or something, but I get the impression that reporting bad news is a good way to get fired in an Elon-run organization.
Much like the Hyperloop before it, the core assumption of the Boring company is ill-conceived. Tunnel boring isn't a bottleneck.
The costs of surveys, hvac, seismic research and maintenance required to keep a deep-underground tunnel going are much higher than cut-and-cover. So, even if tunnel boring was free, it still wouldn't make sense to prefer it over other options. There are very scenarios where deep-tunneling makes sense (dense cities, across rivers when bridges are infeasible), but they're the minority.
In most transit projects, cut-and-over is blocked not because it's a bad technical option. It's because NIMBYs refuse to permit on-the-ground disruptions or noise of any type. San Jose is the canonical example. It's a political problem, not a technical one.
My impression was that the main "innovation" was using sewer tunnel sized tunnels for cars. We already know how to build sewer tunnels relatively cheaply and quickly.
I’m not sure why anyone believed this load of lies, tunnel boring is a mature industry with multiple companies that make tunnel boring machines, and tunnel boring has been around for well over a hundred years. The cutting heads move slowly because they’re between 3 and ~50 feet in diameter (1 to 15 meters for non Americans)
Anyone claiming they can 10x the speed of a physical process that has been worked on by thousands of engineers over more than a century is full of shit. Anyone who bought that explanation is either far too credulous or just doesn’t understand what it takes to bore a large diameter tunnel.
> Anyone claiming they can 10x the speed of a physical process that has been worked on by thousands of engineers over more than a century is full of shit.
Metal machining processes had been around for well over 100 years when tungsten carbide tooling came along, and that increased cutting speeds by 10x over HSS. It happens.
Sure but no one founded companies saying they were going to do exactly that until they actually had tungsten carbide tooling in hand and it was a production engineering issue.
What technology or research was the Boring company sitting on that it expected to utilize to get this advantage?
Which isn't the question: what promising things was the Boring company looking at? Not what they said they wanted to achieve, how were they planning on doing it?
Lithium batteries at all points were quite specific "we think <process> will reduce costs and make them viable".
Tunnel boring is only partly about boring the tunnel itself, bracing the tunnel and removing the spoils probably take as much time as boring the tunnel itself.
It’s a complex process with work crews, management layers, multiple subcontractors, multiple stakeholders, etc. Replacing the tool on a CNC mill with a tungsten carbide tool takes what, a few minutes? Assuming you already have the tool.
It’s also insanely easy to verify a tungsten carbide CNC tool is 10x faster at cutting metal than high speed steel vs. testing ‘This tunnel boring machine will be 10x faster.’
Space launch is a mature industry with multiple companies. Anyone who thinks SpaceX can lower the launch costs by orders of magnitude is either far to credulous or just doesn't understand what it takes to launch a rocket.
NASA procurement was (is?) full of pork barrel politics meant to provide jobs in as many states as possible. I would expect a lean private organization to easily beat NASA in cost per launch. What SpaceX has done is very impressive, I have a lot of respect for what they’ve accomplished.
Space travel is also far less mature than tunnel boring technology, I’d expect advances in space travel before tunnel boring because there’s low hanging fruit. Space travel used to be done only by nation-states, only in the last 25-30 years has private space travel been possible. Tunnel boring machines were invented 200 years ago and were useful about 150 years ago.
Wasn't that the OPs argument?
Companies have been building tunnel after tunnel [..] and optimized the process. No one had tried to large scale industrialize satellite + space launcher production before.
I get the sense that the goalposts get moved to wherever he kicks the ball, even retrospectively. His whole vibe feels like he’s just real-life cosplaying Ironman.
Just spitballing, but maybe it would be possible with relatively modest advances in ion thrusters, and one (admittedly less-than-modest) breakthrough with fusion.
It's maybe too speculative to even matter, but I don't think it's _crazy_ to imagine a handful of AI-fueled advances in materials discovery during the next decade or two. Possibly enough to unlock laser fusion, or something that could be crammed onto a spacecraft.
Code quality is still a culture and prioritisation issue more than a tool issue. You can absolutely write great code using AI.
AI code review has unquestionably increased the quality of my code by helping me find bugs before they make it to production.
AI coding tools give me speed to try out more options to land on a better solution. For example, I wrote a proxy, figured out problems with that approach, and so wrote a service that could accomplish the same thing instead. Being able to get more contact with reality, and seeing how solutions actually work before committing to them, gives you a lot of information to make better decisions.
But then you still need good practices like code review, maintaining coding standards, and good project management to really keep code quality high. AI doesn’t really change that.
> Code quality is still a culture and prioritisation issue more than a tool issue.
AI helps people more that "write" (i.e. generate) low-quality code than people who write high-quality code. This means AI will lead to a larger percentage of new code being low-quality.
that is what they do in the software industry, before it was let me catch you off guard with asking how to reverse a linked list, now its leetcode questions that are so hard that you need to know and study them weekly, and prep for a year, interviewer can tell if you started prep 3 weeks prior
Generative CAD has incredible potential. I've had some decent results with OpenSCAD, but it's clear that current models don't have much "common sense" when it comes to how shapes connect.
If code-based CAD tools were more common, and we had a bigger corpus to pull from, these tools would probably be pretty usable. Without this, however, it seems like we'll need to train against simulations of the physical world.
Yep. It has massive ripple effects for manufacturing, especially as more industry transitions away from fossils for heat generation. Energy accounts for around 40% of the opex for steel manufacturing, for instance. Zero chance we build more steel mills if the cost of electricity continues to skyrocket.
The Chinese have the right approach: Bringing the cost-per-watt down using massive deployments of renewables and ultra high voltage transmission. We were already in the backseat, and now we're not even in the same car.
this reads like youre making an argument that if those western europeans turned off their solar and switched to 100% russian nat gas, that their prices would go down.
but, uhh, the war with ukraine is still ongoing, and i think its likely that the main cost driver for those countries is the nat gas because of sanctions
It’s just populism with no long term planning. They’ve decimated the job market, people are hurting, have given folks someone to hate, it’s an easy win for them.
A lot of Trump's support comes from people wanting to and happy to blame immigrants (of all kinds) for legitimate grievances - such as unemployment, expensive healthcare, housing, and inflation. The distinction between legal and illegal immigration is blurred not only by Democrats but also the economic populists occupying Trump's base. This is aimed at them.
We don't really do it intentionally in English, at least to the same degree. But there's still a lot of information coded in our word and grammar choices.