I would not call the people who ran Twitter before Elon Musk bought the company and took it private "decent people". I think that Musk purchasing the company and running it in a way that a lot of previous userbase objected to was ultimately a huge boon for software freedom - because without that, the large number of people who stopped using Twitter and went to the ATProto ecosystem instead would have been happy to continue using completely-proprietary Twitter. A lot of people were suddenly and viscerally faced with the downsides of building a digital "home" on someone else's platform.
You should explicitly state who those people are, what illogical things they have written, and why they are illogical.
I think it's very likely that people who can plausibly be considered "heroes of the rationalist movement" have written illogical things. But I don't know which specific people and which specific things you mean by that, so I don't know if I think you in particular are correct in your judgement or not.
Using first principles thinking and steelmanning are just rhetorical techniques for persuasive thinking and writing. Even people who are unfamiliar with those particular pieces of terminology do them.
> White supremacists generally deny that they have societal advantages and frame any attempt to give minorities equal opportunities as a plot to subjugate whites.
White people are not a demographic majority in many places (including where I personally live), and yes most ostensible attempts to give nonwhites equal opportunities to whites wind up as blatant anti-white discrimination. White people are morally justified in politically resisting this even if leftists call white people who do so white supremacists or neonazis.
Sure sounds like Adams was consenting to sex and the person gatekeeping the sex and making the consent not a two person affair was his girlfriend, which is why Adams was complaining to begin with.
You're entitled to feel grossed out by this I suppose but your feelings have nothing to do with whether Adams was correct or reasonable or not.
The weird part is, calling women gatekeepers of sex. When it is also men who gatekeeps.
The gross part is, that this reminds of older times, when men had the legal right to have sex with their wife whenever they wanted (it is a quite new thing, that there can be rape in marriage, the current chancellor of germany famously opposed this legal change). In short, patriarcharical BS that women are objects owned by men and that this is the natural order.
I would guess that Adams probably wanted to have sex more than his girlfriend did, which meant that he had lots of personal experiences of his girlfriend not wanting to have sex when he did; and few if any personal experiences of not wanting to have sex when his girlfriend did. From his perspective, this looks like women (his girlfriend in particular) being the gatekeeper of sex. And this is what he was complaining about.
On a society-wide level, men are systematically more interested in having sex more often and in more contexts than women are. So lots of people in heterosexual relationships have experiences similar to Adams' (sex not happening in cases where the man wants it and the woman doesn't), which is why the rhetorical trope that women are the gatekeepers of sex exists.
This ignores capital and opportunity cost. Building a GPU data center or chemical plant costs a lot. If you only use it 20% of the time, you're effectively paying 5x more for that capital equipment.
That ‘negative value’ electricity could also be used to do something else. And actually requires a lot of capital to produce. It isn’t actually free, it’s a side effect of another process that has restraints/restrictions.
When the price of a thing is negative, the entity facing the negative price is being paid to consume it.
We don't have enough automatic integration yet to make it happen, but: Residentially, that'd be a great time to charge millions of EVs and raise the temperature of water heaters. It'd be perfect for getting a head start on heating the glass kiln for Monday morning, or to supplement the used railroad ties and other fuels that might be feeding a lime kiln.
It's pretty easy to think of loads that feature scale and/or quantity, and the ability to switch on and off rather quickly. Even if the negative price event only lasts for an hour. (Even if it only lasts 5 minutes.)
The CapEx (and planning/timing) required to actually use it would almost certainly dwarf any actual gains - notably, because we’d already be selling the electricity for a profit if we could use it productively, the negative price is precisely because the equipment just isn’t there yet.
Also, once said capex was spent so we could actually use that electricity - it’s marginal cost/value would no longer be negative.
Weird huh?
Notably, if these kinds of situations do keep occurring (aren’t just random), someone almost always ends up spending the capital to capture it, because this is obvious.
You just don’t see all the finance geeks pulling out their calculators and talking about their plans because they know secrecy is an important strategic and tactical advantage when arranging investment and building out capital equipment.
It does tend to level itself out, yes. With sufficient adoption of cost-oriented controls, negative price conditions cease to exist and money flows in the normal direction.
And no, I don't think that's weird at all -- that seems like just a natural path towards the desirable goal of balancing generation and load, and turning a negative into a positive.
In terms of implementation: There's already lot of low-hanging fruit. It only takes software to get connected things like EVs and hybrid, grid-tied battery+solar systems to be centrally commanded to take advantage of negative price opportunities.
The hardware already exists, and more of it is being built every day. And software, once written, can be copied infinitely for free.
We already have sellers who would like to sell surplus energy, but find themselves in situations where they cannot. We also have avid buyers who would like to buy energy cheaper, but who cannot take advantage of the surplus condition when it exists.
That's not a inescapable curse. It is instead an opportunity for a new market optimization.
If I wake up on some hypothetical future day and find my hypothetical EV charged to 90% instead of the 80% I might normally seek to limit it to, and this 10% increase happened for free and without any action on my part, then: I win a little bit, and the generating station with the surplus also wins a little bit, and the distribution/transmission systems still get paid for their part.
I'm happy with my tiny win. The generating station is happy with many thousands of their own tiny wins. It's good stuff.
If this happens often enough (or for long-enough periods) for me in my region, then I might seek a normal limit of 70% or even less and be able to opportunistically absorb even more of the surplus when it happens.
The advantage that participation offers me does decrease over time as things balance (if they can ever become balanced), and that's OK too: The generating station still wins.
(We already have systems that do exactly the opposite of this in the consumer space, and we've had them for a very long time. The oldest I'm aware of are radio-controlled relays for water heaters, and the newest I'm aware of involve smart thermostats. These are utility-controlled systems that are intended to shed load instead of generate load. But if it works in one direction, then it can also work in the other direction.)
Yes…. And capital costs to capture that ‘moment’ productively are likely not in favor, if this situation exists long term.
For example, Free power for an hour is useless if someone is running an aluminum refinery, because you can’t just start and stop it; and it costs so much capital to make that only operating 1 hour out of 24 is not economic.
And that is for a situation where electrical power costs are one of the most dominant costs!
The cost of CO2 capture, and conversion into usable fuels, is in the cost of the setup of the infrastructure etc (as well as cost to run the pumps once setup, which in this case is where the free electricity goes).
The return on such an investment is likely negative, because the synthesized fuel does not sell for much (compared to the same fuel that is extracted off the ground and refined - look at natural gas as prime example). Therefore, even if electricity is negative (ala, free), you cannot make money from doing it.
Either the cost of the carbon emissions is captured as part of the cost of fossil fuel extraction (and returned to this carbon capture/conversion system) to make it break even, or something else has to happen (like massive efficiency increase in doing such conversions) in order to make it economical.
The problem here is that the production of hydrocarbons, ammonia, etc. from electricity can only make back its high upfront investment when it runs basically 24/7. This is a challenge for renewables.
In China which recently opened a large off-grid green ammonia plant in Chifeng, they use multiple tiers of energy storage to ensure constant electric power availability.
The problem is the capital cost of any of that type of equipment sitting around idle or under-capacity, ready to go when the electricity price goes down. It's likely more profitable to run them most of the time, even with positive electric rates, and then only stop using them when rates are exceptionally high ("load shedding").
This is why you see most opportunistic electricity consumption systems doing resistive heating - this equipment is inexpensive.
I don't like bash, and this kind of esoteric, hard-to-remember syntax is a big reason why. Software developers and computer users should want their shell to be easy to use and reason about, just as they reasonably want this from their general-purpose software development languages.
bash is a UNIX legacy tool from the 80s that lingers on in software written today because it's part of the POSIX standard (well, sh, which is close enough), and because generations of developers on UNIX-like systems can be assumed to be familiar with it. I don't think this is a good thing, and I would like to see active efforts to replace the use of bash with better, more-modern scripting languages that provide an easier-to-understand more-reliable experience for users.
> If BTreeMap outperformed his hash table, that is either because the hash table implementation was poor, or because the access patterns favored B-tree cache locality. Neither tells you anything about Rust vs C. It is a data structure benchmark.
The specific thing it tells you about Rust vs C is that Rust makes using an optimized BTreeMap the default, much-easier thing to do when actually writing code. This is a developer experience feature rather than a raw language performance feature, since you could in principle write an equally-performant BTreeMap in C. But in practice Bryan Cantrill wasn't doing that.
> More importantly, choosing between a hash table and a tree is an architectural decision with real trade-offs. It is not something that should be left to "whatever the standard library defaults to". If you are picking data structures without understanding why, that is on you, not on C's lack of a blessed standard library (BTW one size cannot fit all).
The Rust standard library provides both a hash table and a b-tree map, and it's pretty easy to pull in a library that provides a more specialized map data structure if you need one for something (because in general it's easier to pull in any library for anything in a Rust project set up the default way). Again, a better developer experience that leads to developers making better decisions writing their software, rather than a fundamentally more performant language.
> Everything I read made reference to the Bible, something I had never read nor was in any way acquainted with. The references kept appearing and eventually I decided to dive in head first and read it. Putting the King James Version of the Bible on my kindle, over many months I read it cover to cover.
> At the time, I wouldn't have called myself an Atheist. Agnostic is not the right word to use either. Not that I believed or didn't believe in the existence of God, in truth, I had simply never thought about it. In place of an answer was lack of the preceding question.
> I finished reading the Bible. It resonated with me in a way nothing else had before. A mirror was put in front of me and I saw myself clearly for the first time. Finding God, I realized how far I had drifted from the straight and narrow. Weak of mind, steeped in sin, ruled by bodily desires and whims of fancy, the life I led could only lead to one place: the broad road alongside the liars, thieves, fornicators, murderers and cheats, for I was one of them.
I'd like to see this person write in detail about specifically what about the Bible they found resonant, and specifically resonant in a way that lead them towards something like a Judeo-Christian understanding of God and sinfulness. I note that they do not mention Jesus Christ, who is the most important figure in the second part of the Bible, and (arguably) entirely absent from the first half - and indeed the schism between Jews who only take the first half of the Bible seriously and Christians who take the second half seriously as well is a pretty important one!
This isn't a troll post on my part, although I admit that I'm somewhat skeptical that this person read the King James Version of the Bible and was specifically convinced by the various writings in that long and complex text that some kind of Judeo-Christian understanding of the nature of God is the correct one. I think it's more likely that they were in some kind of personal spiritual crisis, read the foundational scripture of one of the major world religions, and were moved in a kind of a general way. I suspect that if they were reading books that made more references to the Quran or to Buddhist sutras, they might've found themselves reading the Quran or Buddhist sutras and ended up in a similar mental state. But I'm not sure of that, which is why I'm genuinely curious to hear more about what specifically in the text of the Bible they found meaningful.
As someone raised in the Jewish faith, and having spent time also learning about the New Testament and the Quran (though without having read the texts directly), I'm inclined to think Christianity on paper is "the best" of the Abrahamic religions, in that the core messages of Jesus are about forgiveness, nonviolence, and helping one another. These messages are in the Torah and the Quran too, to be clear, but specifically with matters of sexuality, gender, and gender roles, Christianity is the most "forgiving" of people who are non-normative or opposed to those norms in the first place.
I say this as someone who doesn't believe in any religion fwiw, not as a born-again Christian or whatever.
And I also want to be clear that there are progressive interpretations of all religious texts, people of all religious practices can be LGBTQ, poly, drug users. And religion can also be used to justify incredible acts of evil. Christianity was the justification for the Inquisition and the Crusades after all, despite the violence of both certainly going against the teachings of Jesus.
> I'm inclined to think Christianity on paper is "the best" of the Abrahamic religions
Abrahamic? Maybe. I have studied comparative religion somewhat -- more than the vast majority of religious people -- and the least unpleasant "religion" by far is old-school Buddhism.
The original has been widely corrupted and turned into a forest of competing rival faiths, most of which have become religions, but the original seems to me to have been designed by someone very smart, who studied, subjected themselves to various allegedly spiritually-improving practices... and then wrote down a sort of vaccination to inculcate into people carefully designed to protect them from religion.
Religions are contagious memetic infections. Virtually nobody that calls themselves Christian actually follows what little is known of the teachings of Yeshweh. In practice, "being Christian" is not so much a recommendation as a warning.
In my 58 years, I have so far met one (1) person who was a true Yeshweh follower.
Original Buddhism was an inoculation to protect lesser minds from memetic infection.
But it itself has been corrupted by viral influences, to paraphrase Neal Stephenson, and turned into what it sought to protect people from.
Any sect of Christianity that has a name should be avoided. Ditto Islam, Judaism, all the big ones.
For a good overview of world religions, I recommend this excellent book:
> specifically what about the Bible they found resonant
A valid point.
I'm not interested, myself, but this is an interesting question.
My upbringing was very vaguely Church of England Protestant. I read very fast and read a large chunk of the bible as a child. I decided when I was 11 that religion was a fairy story, just a work of fiction and nothing more, and that I didn't believe in it.
I have read much of the Christian bible, and I was top of the class in religious studies at school. I am confident that I know much more about Christianity than 99% of Christians, and most ex-Christian atheists I know are the same.
For most intelligent adults, actually reading the bible is a leading cause of atheism. This is a meme among atheists.
I have never heard of anyone getting religion from the bible before.
During the Joseon era of Korea, Christianity was suppressed. Nevertheless, Western books made their to Korea including the Bible. Among the nobility some secretly converted just from reading the Bible. Korea’s first saint was one of grandchildren of those who converted purely from reading.
Codes of conduct are an intersectional-feminist political demand, and are often explicitly justified in terms of protecting women and other marginalized demographics such as genderqueer people from what they view as harassment. Talking things out "man-to-man" is the opposite the discourse norm organizations with codes of conduct want to enforce.
I don't think he let his right-leaning views become his entire personality. Getting embroiled in controversy is something that happens because of the way other people react to your views, not directly because of those views themselves.
reply