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> But he has structured it in a way that prevents the money from helping this goal.

I suspect it's worse. It's structured in a way that will probably harm the goal.

The money will go to people who somehow already managed to marshal enough resources to get to the Olympics. Good on you for supporting people after the fact, but by that point money problems have long before winnowed far too many qualified athletes out of the pipeline.

That kid from Moab would be an amazing swimmer. That kid from Punxsutawney shoots one hell of a bow. That kid from Tuscaloosa would have a smoking slapshot. None of them have a hope of clearing the initial monetary barriers.

The most effective time to apply resources is when the athletes are young, not done.


>It's structured in a way that will probably harm the goal.

Potentially could also stop others from donating to athletes because they hear this and think "some rich guy already took care of them" not knowing the details.


> Not sure if it's an American pronunciation thing

It's a bad American pronunciation thing like "Febuwary" and "nuculer".

If you pronounce the syllables correctly, "an-ec-dote", "Feb-ru-ar-y", "nu-cle-ar" the spellings follow.

English has it's fair share of spelling stupidities, but if people don't even pronounce the words correctly there is no hope.


https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/February

The pronunciation of the first r with a y sound has always been one of two possible standards, in fact "February" is a re-Latinizing spelling but English doesn’t like the br-r sound so it naturally dissimilates to by-r.


> The "hitting a wall" / "plateau" people will continue to be loud and wrong. Just as they have been since 2018[0].

Everybody who bet against Moore's Law was wrong ... until they weren't.

And AI is the reaction to Moore's Law having broken. Nobody gave one iota of damn about trying to make programming easier until the chips couldn't double in speed anymore.


This is exactly backwards: Dennard scaling stopped. Moore’s Law has continued and it’s what made training and running inference on these models practical at interactive timescales.

You are technically correct. The best kind of correct.

However, most people don't know the difference between the proper Moore's Law scaling (the cost of a transistor halves every 2 years) which is still continuing (sort of) and the colloquial version (the speed of a transistor doubles every 2 years) which got broken when Dennard scaling ran out. To them, Moore's Law just broke.

Nevertheless, you are reinforcing my point. Nobody gave a damn about improving the "programming" side of things until the hardware side stopped speeding up.

And rather than try to apply some human brainpower to fix the "programming" side, they threw a hideous number of those free (except for the electricity--but we don't mention that--LOL) transistors at the wall to create a broken, buggy, unpredictable machine simulacrum of a "programmer".

(Side note: And to be fair, it looks like even the strong form of Moore's Law is finally slowing down, too)


If you can turn a few dollars of electricity per hour into a junior-level programmer who never gets bored, tired, or needs breaks, that fundamentally changes the economics of information technology.

And in fact, the agentic looped LLMs are executing much better than that today. They could stop advancing right now and still be revolutionary.


1) The problem with teaching is that "filler" often isn't.

Teaching is art and not science in spite of what so many tech folks think. If I'm teaching a hard subject, I don't know a priori what will click with each student. I'm trying to give you multiple tools for you to try to use while working on problems to get you to your next level of understanding. Some of those tools are idiosyncratic to my experience and not in the textbook. Most of my suggestions are going to wind up being useless to a particular student, but I'm hoping that at least one of them connects properly.

For example, the biggest complaint of linear algebra students is "This is boring and doesn't have any use." Well, I can talk about how its used in graphics, but the mathematicians will call that filler. I can talk about solving differential equation systems for the engineers, but the CS students will call that filler. The instructor, of course, thinks all that stuff is filler and would rather get back to teaching the subject, but understands that getting people interested and enthusiastic is a part of the teaching process.

2) The "filler" part of "traditional" media is completely different for each person while "social" media filler is useless to everybody.

This is something that so many people don't seem to grasp. Each individual will fixate on and take something different from a book or lecture. That's good. As long as each part of media resonates and has a purpose with somebody consuming it, it's not "filler".

The problem is that "social" media rewards behaviors that create useless "filler". So, social media is in a war--people get more sensitive to ignoring useless filler; the social media sites ramp more aggressive garbage; people get more sensitive; lather, rinse, repeat.

The problem is that your social media "useless filler" pattern matcher learns to be super aggressive and classifies anything that doesn't immediately engage with you, personally and immediately as garbage. That's fine when doomscrolling; that's not fine when reading a book or listening to a lecture.

That's not to say that there aren't poor lectures or poor quality books. There very definitely are. And you should definitely leave those behind.

However, you need to turn those super aggressive filler filters off when an author or lecturer is genuinely trying to engage you in good faith. If an author or lecturer did the work, is well-prepared, and is making solid points and progress, you need give them the leeway to do their job.


> And what's so special about books in particular, anyway?

Concentration is a skill that needs to be practiced. A book is the easiest way to practice that skill.

Concentration is a skill that is useful broadly in human endeavors. I'll leave it to the social scientists to document the general damage that a lack of concentration does.

I can tell how much damage gets done depending upon the length since I last read a book. If I go a couple of months between books because of interruptions, my reading speed drastically slows down and my patience is really compromised. I didn't notice this happen before the rise of cell phones. Back then, a couple months of interruptions didn't seem to slow my reading speed much at all.


> Fantasy can be profound and thought provoking.

It can be, but there has always been a lot of garbage like any art form. "The Well-Tempered Plot Device" is more than 40 years old now. https://news.ansible.uk/plotdev.html

And even the best authors are infested with "series-itis" and especially the fatal malady "series incompletus".

My sci-fi/fantasy reading habit broke because I refused to start any series that wasn't finished. Suddenly, 99% of sci-fi/fantasy disappeared.

My only hope for David Gerrold to finish the "War Against the Chtorr" series is for him to have notes that he hands to someone else. The last book was 36 years ago! Don't complain to me about George R. R. Martin. Amateurs.


> Vimeo was not particularly worthless, but it was also not particularly profitable either. In truth, Vimeo had always been a red-headed step child inside of IAC.

Another profitable, sustainable company sacrificed on the Altar of Unicorn(tm).


The Three Mile Island disaster had similar problems with notifications.

The problem at TMI was that the teletypewriter delivering the alerts wasn't fast enough to finish typing before new alerts came in. As time went on, the information it was emitting got further and further behind. Even if the operators wanted to make intelligent decisions, they were operating on hours old data that no longer applied.


You happened to have an opposing train at exactly the point where the train derailed.

That's simply really, really rare bad luck.

Practically anything you can think of is going to be a more effective use of safety resources than trying to contain a derailing high-speed train.


The problem I have with streaming radio is that it seems to be caught rehashing rather than discovering.

For example, I like SOMA's Underground 80s, but I also want to hear new artists in the same vein. I haven't found any streaming stations that are actively good at curating like this.

Where are the streaming stations that play Smiths and Smithereens but also play Blossoms and Johnny Marr's new stuff, for example?


Yeah, that's why I specifically called out KEXP for this, as they do lots of live shows, themed segments, etc, that really do enable discovery.

Unfortunately you're quite right about Soma (and probably other streaming radio) - but I imagine licensing new music can be difficult/expensive.


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