deepdeeppuddle's recent activity

  1. Comment on A slow guide to confronting doom in ~health.mental

    deepdeeppuddle
    Link Parent
    How do you use AI in your work? How does it help you accomplish more in less time? I haven’t seen much evidence that AI has been having an effect on the macroeconomy, on (un)employment, or the...

    How do you use AI in your work? How does it help you accomplish more in less time?

    I haven’t seen much evidence that AI has been having an effect on the macroeconomy, on (un)employment, or the productivity of individual companies. I am open to seeing statistics that show an impact, though.

    1 vote

  2. Comment on Bluesky’s quest to build nontoxic social media in ~tech

    deepdeeppuddle
    Link Parent
    Thank you for sharing this. It’s interesting but, as you said, not very active.

    Thank you for sharing this. It’s interesting but, as you said, not very active.

    1 vote

  3. Comment on A slow guide to confronting doom in ~health.mental

    deepdeeppuddle
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    You are right. Here’s a comment from the Effective Altruism Forum, which has a lot of overlap with the LessWrong forum. There is overlap in terms of the user base, posts (people cross-post to...

    Trade wars and democratic backsliding seem too mundane to be significant LessWrong concerns.

    You are right.

    Here’s a comment from the Effective Altruism Forum, which has a lot of overlap with the LessWrong forum. There is overlap in terms of the user base, posts (people cross-post to both, and there’s even a feature built-in to both forums to make this easier), and discussion topics (particularly AGI). The forums also share the same code base.

    This comment is about Daniela Amodei, the President of the AI company Anthropic. The context is a discussion about whether it’s appropriate to look up information on the personal website she created for her wedding and publicly discuss it.

    …I will just say that by the "level of influence" metric, Daniela shoots it out of the park compared to Donald Trump. I think it is entirely uncontroversial and perhaps an understatement to claim the world as a whole and EA [effective altruism] in particular has a right to know & discuss pretty much every fact about the personal, professional, social, and philosophical lives of the group of people who, by their own admission, are literally creating God. And are likely to be elevated to a permanent place of power & control over the universe for all of eternity.

    Such a position should not be a pleasurable job with no repercussions on the level of privacy or degree of public scrutiny on your personal life. If you are among this group, and this level of scrutiny disturbs you, perhaps you shouldn't be trying to "reshape the lightcone without public consent" or knowledge.

    Note that 4 people have voted “agree” (that’s what the check mark symbol means).

    This helps put into perspective what people in this community are worrying about right now.

    4 votes

  4. Comment on A slow guide to confronting doom in ~health.mental

    deepdeeppuddle
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    I really dislike LessWrong for reasons I explained at length in a series of comments on a post from February. If you’re curious, you can find my comments by starting here and then looking at the...

    I really dislike LessWrong for reasons I explained at length in a series of comments on a post from February. If you’re curious, you can find my comments by starting here and then looking at the replies down the chain.

    For those who don’t know, LessWrong is an online forum that has users from around the world, but is also closely connected to an IRL community of people in the San Francisco Bay Area who self-identify as “rationalists”. Rationalists have one primary fixation above all else, which is artificial general intelligence (AGI), and, more specifically, the fear that it will kill all humans sometime in the near future. That’s the “doom” that this LessWrong post is about.

    On the topic of AGI, I wrote a post here, in which I expressed frustration at the polarized discourse on AGI and discussed how the conversation could potentially be refined by focusing better benchmarks for AI performance.

    I’ll say a little more on the topic of AGI.

    I think there are a number of bad reasons to reject the idea of AGI, such as:

    • dualism, the idea that the mind is non-physical or supernatural

    • mysterianism, the idea that the mind can never be understood by science

    • overly simple or dismissive misunderstandings of deep learning and deep reinforcement learning

    • the belief that AI research will run out of funding

    That said, I also think there are a number of bad reasons to believe that AGI will be created soon:

    • being overly impressed with ChatGPT and insufficiently critical of its failures to produce intelligent behaviour

    • a belief that the intelligence of AI systems will rapidly, exponentially increase without plateauing, despite serious empirical and theoretical problems with this idea (such as economic data failing to support that this has been happening so far)

    • a reliance on poor benchmarks that don’t really measure intelligence

    • knee-jerk dismissal of well-qualified critics like Yann LeCun and François Chollet

    • over-reliance on the opinions of other people about AGI, without enough examination of why they hold those opinions (e.g. how much is it circular? How much of those other people’s opinions is based on other people’s opinions?)

    It is difficult to find nuanced discussion of AGI online lately because most of the discussion I see is either people taking hardline anti-AI positions (e.g. it’s all just a scam) or people with an extreme, eschatological belief in near-term AGI.

    I highly doubt that we will see AGI within ten years. Within a hundred years? Possibly. But there’s a lot of irreducible uncertainty and there’s no way we can really know right now.

    12 votes

  5. Comment on Bluesky’s quest to build nontoxic social media in ~tech

    deepdeeppuddle
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I don’t know if you meant to reply to me or you meant to reply to skybrian and replied to me on accident. In the comment I wrote that you’re replying to, I said: If I had to guess, I would guess...

    I don’t know if you meant to reply to me or you meant to reply to skybrian and replied to me on accident. In the comment I wrote that you’re replying to, I said:

    I think microblogging is just fundamentally a bad idea. It doesn't matter if it's Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, or Threads, it's all fundamentally the same idea for a social network and it all suffers from the same problems.

    If I had to guess, I would guess that most people’s lives would be improved on net if they stopped using microblogging platforms. I would also guess that the world would be improved on net if microblogging platforms stopped existing. But I don’t know for sure, and I don’t need to know for sure, since that decision isn’t up to me.

    When I was describing in my comment above what I want to see in an online platform, I was indeed, describing a fundamentally different type of online platform than a microblogging platform. (I think we should try to move past microblogging as an idea. Or, at least, I, personally, don’t want to use microblogging platforms anymore.)

    1 vote

  6. Comment on Bluesky’s quest to build nontoxic social media in ~tech

    deepdeeppuddle
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    You can read like 50,000 words of exchanges between developers discussing/debating how decentralized Bluesky is, if you really want to get into the weeds:...

    You can read like 50,000 words of exchanges between developers discussing/debating how decentralized Bluesky is, if you really want to get into the weeds:

    1. https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

    2. https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t

    3. https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/

    I have only read bits of it because it’s incredibly long and I don’t have a dog in this fight anyway. As I said in my comment above, I think microblogging is a deeply troubled idea and most of us would probably be better off quitting it all, regardless of how decentralized or centralized any of the platforms are.

    One observation, though: Bluesky is actually decentralized in an important way Mastodon isn’t. Mastodon doesn’t allow yourself to migrate your posts from one Mastodon instance to another. AT Protocol, which Bluesky is based on, is designed to allow that.

    When mastodon.lol, one of the biggest and most widely recommended Mastodon instances, shut down, the 12,000 people who were unfortunate enough to have signed up there had no way to migrate their posts anywhere else. That’s such a bummer.

    I think I had only posted a handful of times there and I only found out about the instance shutting down after it happened. There was no way to migrate my posts or my accounts, or even to see what I had posted. Not a big loss for me, personally, but it does reveal a weakness in the Mastodon model.

    The claim that Bluesky “isn’t decentralized at all” or that Bluesky’s decentralization is “a lie” seems, to me, like it doesn’t really engage with the complexity of the topic.

    8 votes

  7. Comment on Bluesky’s quest to build nontoxic social media in ~tech

    deepdeeppuddle
    (edited )
    Link
    I think Bluesky is doing a good job at running a microblogging site (as far as I can tell). They seem to have good moderation. I like the design of the website and the app. The decentralization...
    • Exemplary

    I think Bluesky is doing a good job at running a microblogging site (as far as I can tell). They seem to have good moderation. I like the design of the website and the app. The decentralization strikes a good balance between usability and "forkability" (credible exit).

    That said, I think microblogging is just fundamentally a bad idea. It doesn't matter if it's Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, or Threads, it's all fundamentally the same idea for a social network and it all suffers from the same problems. Maybe, theoretically, someone could create a microblogging platform that is different. But it hasn't happened yet. (And the problem isn't investors, money, financial incentives, ownership, centralization, a lack of federation, a lack of customization options for users, or minor design decisions that could be fixed with a few tweaks, but the general idea of a microblogging platform as we understand it today.)

    I quit Twitter in early 2021 and it was a great decision. It reduced my anxiety. It freed up my mind to focus on better things. It felt like turning off a noisy radio. Only in the silence afterward could I appreciate how much it had been grating on my nerves.

    Ezra Klein has a beautiful polemic against Twitter in this podcast at 38:15. (The podcast is from December 2022.) He talks about why he quit Twitter and why we shouldn't want a Twitter alternative like Mastodon, Threads, or Bluesky. He's talked more about this in later podcasts and also in a few New York Times columns. In one column, he writes:

    Twitter forces nuanced thoughts down to bumper-sticker bluntness. The chaotic, always moving newsfeed leaves little time for reflection on whatever has just been read. The algorithm’s obsession with likes and retweets means users mainly see (and produce) speech that flatters their community or demonizes those they already loathe. The quote tweet function encourages mockery rather than conversation. The frictionless slide between thought and post, combined with the absence of an edit function, encourages impulsive reaction rather than sober consideration. It is not that difficult conversations cannot or have not happened on the platform. It is more that they should not happen on the platform.

    Ev Williams, who co-founded Twitter and later founded Medium, once said in an interview that Twitter was like the limbic system — fast, twitchy, noisy, knee-jerk, reflexive, impulsive — and he wanted Medium to be more like the pre-frontal cortex — slow, quiet, reflective, considered. Initially, Medium didn't even have the ability to leave comments on posts, which I believe was a deliberate design decision to encourage reading and thinking, rather than reacting.

    I don't know if anyone has quite cracked what good online platforms should be like. A few aspects I think are important:

    -A focus on longer-form content. The maximum length of a tweet is 280 characters (or at least it used to be). In my view, a good social network will have many posts that are 5x, 10x, or 20x longer than this. I think blogging and newsletter platforms like Medium and Substack are sort of on the right track. There are also some niche forums where it's normalized to write blog-length posts.

    -Really strict moderation and community norms around respect and kindness. In practice, this is hard to achieve. I've moderated several different kinds of online communities from small to large. It's incredibly hard. But we have to try, otherwise what's the point of any of it? I feel like the status quo is that online life is so nasty it poisons our real relationships because we take that nastiness off the computer and into our real lives. What if it could be the reverse? What if online communities made kindness the norm to the extent it encouraged us to be softer in our real life relationships?

    -An experience centred around forming relationships and community with people, in which you gain familiarity with people over time. (Clearly visible profile pictures and different coloured usernames can help with this!) Think small Twitch and Discord communities (Slack used to be used for small communities sometimes too, but now it's pretty much all Discord), small or medium forums, and online games with small communities. The opposite, which we want to avoid, is an overwhelming, chaotic flood of content, in which you can't keep track of what's happening and you might not even realize if you encountered the same person twice. Think Twitter, TikTok, and Reddit. Ultimately, we want to slow down the pace of information consumption (and the speed of reaction), humanize people, and create conditions that foster the growth of one-to-one human connection over time.

    I don't think the primary obstacle to building online platforms that have these properties is that big tech companies have bad ethics, bad management, or bad incentives. The barrier to entry to creating new online platforms and new online communities is fairly low. Network effects and coordination problems make things harder, sure. But I ultimately see this as an innovation problem, or a creativity problem. Or a design problem, or a research problem — however you want to categorize it. The problem is a lack of good ideas about what to do.

    38 votes

  8. Comment on ‘The terror is real’: an appalled US tech industry is scared to criticize Elon Musk in ~tech

    deepdeeppuddle
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    This sets off my spidey senses for misinformation for a few reasons: Even deaf people who try to lip read all the time say it's not very accurate. From a quick Google, the estimates of how much of...

    I watched Obama say to GWB "How do we stop this?" (This was from a tiktok video of a deaf person lipreading their interaction at Trumps latest inauguration).

    This sets off my spidey senses for misinformation for a few reasons:

    1. Even deaf people who try to lip read all the time say it's not very accurate. From a quick Google, the estimates of how much of English speech can be discerned from lip reading seem to be in the 30% to 45% range (source 1, source 2, source 3). Out of curiosity, I looked at the video of Barack Obama speaking and it's a side profile of Obama's face with his head actually angled away from the camera. You can barely see his lips.

    2. Even if this sentence were 100% accurately lip read, we wouldn't know the context or the intended meaning of Obama's words. We could try to guess or infer it, but we might be wrong.

    3. The source is TikTok and the quality of information on TikTok is absolutely abysmal. I think TikTok is great for comedy videos, jokes, sketches, improv, etc. if you find the right people to follow but the idea of someone trying to get factual information from TikTok or reasonable analysis is scary to me. (One investigation concluded that about 20% of TikTok videos contain misinformation.)

    4. No reputable news source picked up on the story. A few unreputable sources that uncritically share popular posts or videos from social media published articles about it. This is only weak evidence, but if the claim that Obama said this were credible, I would guess some journalist somewhere would show the video to a lip reading expert and see if they can confirm what the TikToker claimed. From the absence of any reputable article about this story, we can infer that either no journalist investigated the story or they did and found the TikToker's claim was not credible.

    Edit: One small thing people can do to strengthen liberal democracy in liberal democratic countries is to stop using TikTok as a source for factual information, especially information about political news. That means either not using the app at all or tuning your algorithm so that your feed is only funny videos, cute animal videos, beautiful nature videos, personal vlogs, etc. And then skipping any "informational" videos (a high percentage of which will be misinformational) that slip through.

    In practice, I've found it hard enough to retrain my algorithm when it got in a bad place that I created a new account. It was a pain, but it worked in the end.

    It also bears mentioning that TikTok is ultimately under the control of an authoritarian government and there is some evidence to suggest that this authoritarian government may be using TikTok to influence political opinion in democratic countries in a way that serves its interests.

    50 votes

  9. Comment on When is it okay to give up? in ~life

    deepdeeppuddle
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    This is an essentially impossible question for another person to answer, even a therapist, and especially a random stranger on the Internet. But talking this out with a therapist or a friend can...

    This is an essentially impossible question for another person to answer, even a therapist, and especially a random stranger on the Internet. But talking this out with a therapist or a friend can help get you to clarity.

    I say it's an impossible question for another person to answer because, in my experience, for me, making a decision about continuing or discontinuing a relationship with a friend or partner or family member that feels right is about soul searching and connecting deeply with my gut feeling and intuition, and understanding all the nuances of all my experiences with that person over time. Only I know all that information about all those experiences and I only I can connect with my deep, inner feelings like that.

    I empathize because it's such a painful situation to be in. To stay in the relationship or leave the relationship is painful, and to not know what to do and be in between is also painful.

    Do you have someone in your life right now who makes you feel seen, who listens to you, who cares what you think and feel, and who supports you? If not, maybe focusing on building those kinds of relationships is a good idea. Since it will make either choice, either outcome easier to bear.

    2 votes

  10. Comment on Are any of you fans of the older Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons games? in ~games

    deepdeeppuddle
    Link Parent
    I had no idea about the weird history of Friends of Mineral Town. Thank you for that explanation. If you play the PC version of Stardew Valley, there are so many mods that will let you tweak the...

    I had no idea about the weird history of Friends of Mineral Town. Thank you for that explanation.

    If you play the PC version of Stardew Valley, there are so many mods that will let you tweak the game to your heart's content. An ambitious one is Stardew Valley Expanded, which I never got around to installing because ConcernedApe kept adding content to the game and I wanted to finish the vanilla game before installing mods.

    I just checked and there is even a rival marriages mod, even though I'm not sure I even understand what rival marriages are: https://www.nexusmods.com/stardewvalley/mods/6200

    If you have anyone to play with, I found Stardew Valley 10x more fun playing with someone than by myself. But that's up to personal preference, I guess.

    2 votes

  11. Comment on Are any of you fans of the older Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons games? in ~games

    deepdeeppuddle
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    Eric Barone, a.k.a. ConcernedApe, the developer of Stardew Valley created Stardew Valley because he was unsatisfied with the Harvest Moon series: (Source: The Cornell Daily Sun) I adore Stardew...

    Eric Barone, a.k.a. ConcernedApe, the developer of Stardew Valley created Stardew Valley because he was unsatisfied with the Harvest Moon series:

    When I asked Barone about his inspiration for the game, he cited Harvest Moon as a game he played growing up, mentioning that the “unique gameplay and immersive atmosphere left a lasting impression” on him. However, he also felt the numbing dissatisfaction that many gamers, such as myself, faced after each subsequent Harvest Moon title was released. "I felt like the series had gotten progressively worse after Harvest Moon: Back to Nature," Barone said. "I searched all over the Internet for a fan-made alternative but never found anything satisfying. So when I set out to make a game of my own, I decided to make the Harvest Moon-esque game I had always longed for."

    (Source: The Cornell Daily Sun)

    I adore Stardew Valley. It's one of my favourite games of all time. But I found it challenging and lonely at first. I found it hard to persist playing. Playing it multiplayer with my brother unlocked the fun for me.

    I tried playing Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town on the Switch (I guess it's a re-make of a Game Boy Advance game?) because I love Stardew Valley and because I'd heard people express love for the Harvest Moon games. It really disappointed me and I regretted buying it. I could really see how the Harvest Moon games were a blueprint for Stardew Valley that ConcernedApe followed closely, and I could see how ConcernedApe improved so much on Friends of Mineral Town in so many different ways.

    I would love to try a game or two that is similar enough to Stardew Valley that it captures some of what makes Stardew Valley fun but that is different enough that it doesn't just feel like a rehashing or imitation of Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon. I've played a bunch of different survivalcraft games, "cozy" games, farming sims, business sims, etc. and Stardew Valley still stands out as a unique, special game. Animal Crossing: New Horizons also shines bright, but what it's missing for me that it is so gentle and kid-friendly that it lacks the punishing grind that I crave from Stardew Valley.

    4 votes

  12. Comment on I'm rate-limited to one comment reply every two hours in ~tildes

    deepdeeppuddle
    Link Parent
    I'm still rate limited. I've only ever had one Tildes account, this one.

    I'm still rate limited. I've only ever had one Tildes account, this one.

    4 votes

  13. I'm rate-limited to one comment reply every two hours

    ~tildes Ask
    I understand that Tildes implements rate limiting for replies to comments in order to discourage excessive back-and-forth debates or arguments. My current rate limit is one reply every 2 hours....

    I understand that Tildes implements rate limiting for replies to comments in order to discourage excessive back-and-forth debates or arguments. My current rate limit is one reply every 2 hours. So, if I reply to a comment on one post and then try to reply to a comment on another post, it tells me I have to wait 120 minutes (minus however many minutes since my last comment) until I can comment again.

    Is this the normal rate limit? If so, don't people find this... limiting?

    Update (2025-04-09 at 08:22 UTC): I was just able to comment twice within ten minutes, so it seems the rate limit has disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared.

    19 votes

  14. Comment on What if we made advertising illegal? in ~tech

    deepdeeppuddle
    Link Parent
    This comment is beautifully written, observant, thoughtful, and funny. I'm disappointed to see multiple replies that are hostile and unfair. You acknowledge some downsides and excesses of...

    This comment is beautifully written, observant, thoughtful, and funny. I'm disappointed to see multiple replies that are hostile and unfair. You acknowledge some downsides and excesses of advertising and point out a non-obvious upside of advertising (beauty, glamour, creativity).

    If you want to have a complex, nuanced perspective on advertising, you need to find a way to integrate both the downsides and the upsides into your perspective. I'm really tired of black-and-white thinking on topics related to economics, politics, policy, tech, and social change. I don't know why some people have chosen to be so combative toward this comment in particular.

    Despite the disagreements in the comments on this post, there seems to be a lot of agreement that some new regulations of advertising would be a good idea. A more constructive path for the conversation to follow: what specific regulations would improve things?

    5 votes

  15. The ARC-AGI-2 benchmark could help reframe the conversation about AI performance in a more constructive way

    ~tech Ask
    The popular online discourse on Large Language Models’ (LLMs’) capabilities is often polarized in a way I find annoying and tiresome. On one end of the spectrum, there is nearly complete dismissal...

    The popular online discourse on Large Language Models’ (LLMs’) capabilities is often polarized in a way I find annoying and tiresome.

    On one end of the spectrum, there is nearly complete dismissal of LLMs: an LLM is just a slightly fancier version of the autocomplete on your phone’s keyboard, there’s nothing to see here, move on (dot org).

    This dismissive perspective overlooks some genuinely interesting novel capabilities of LLMs. For example, I can come up with a new joke and ask ChatGPT to explain why it’s funny or come up with a new reasoning problem and ask ChatGPT to solve it. My phone’s keyboard can’t do that.

    On the other end of the spectrum, there are eschatological predictions: human-level or superhuman artificial general intelligence (AGI) will likely be developed within 10 years or even within 5 years, and skepticism toward such predictions is “AI denialism”, analogous to climate change denial. Just listen to the experts!

    There are inconvenient facts for this narrative, such as that the majority of AI experts give much more conservative timelines for AGI when asked in surveys and disagree with the idea that scaling up LLMs could lead to AGI.

    The ARC Prize is an attempt by prominent AI researcher François Chollet (with help from Mike Knoop, who apparently does AI stuff at Zapier) to introduce some scientific rigour into the conversation. There is a monetary prize for open source AI systems that can perform well on a benchmark called ARC-AGI-2, which recently superseded the ARC-AGI benchmark. (“ARC” stands for “Abstract and Reasoning Corpus”.)

    ARC-AGI-2 is not a test of whether an AI is an AGI or not. It’s intended to test whether AI systems are making incremental progress toward AGI. The tasks the AI is asked to complete are colour-coded visual puzzles like you might find in a tricky puzzle game. (Example.) The intention is to design tasks that are easy for humans to solve and hard for AI to solve.

    The current frontier AI models score less than 5% on ARC-AGI-2. Humans score 60% on average and 100% of tasks have been solved by at least two humans in two attempts or less.

    For me, this helps the conversation about AI capabilities because it gives a rigorous test and quantitative measure to my casual, subjective observations that LLMs routinely fail at tasks that are easy for humans.

    François Chollet was impressed when OpenAI’s o3 model scored 75.7% on ARC-AGI (the older version of the benchmark). He emphasizes the concept of “fluid intelligence”, which he seems to define as the ability to adapt to new situations and solve novel problems. Chollet thinks that o3 is the first AI system to demonstrate fluid intelligence, although it’s still a low level of fluid intelligence. (o3 also required thousands of dollars’ worth of computation to achieve this result.)

    This is the sort of distinction that can’t be teased out by the polarized popular discourse. It’s the sort of nuanced analysis I’ve been seeking out, but which has been drowned out by extreme positions on LLMs that ignore inconvenient facts.

    I would like to see more benchmarks that try to do what AGI-AGI-2 does: find problems that humans can easily solve and frontier AI models can’t solve. These sort of benchmarks can help us measure AGI progress much more usefully than the typical benchmarks, which play to LLMs’ strengths (e.g. massive-scale memorization) and don’t challenge them on their weaknesses (e.g. reasoning).

    I long to see AGI within my lifetime. But the super short timeframes given by some people in the AI industry feel to me like they border on mania or psychosis. The discussion is unrigorous, with people pulling numbers out of thin air based on gut feeling.

    It’s clear that there are many things humans are good at doing that AI can’t do at all (where the humans vs. AI success rate is ~100% vs. ~0%). It serves no constructive purpose to ignore this truth and it may serve AI research to develop rigorous benchmarks around it.

    Such benchmarks will at least improve the quality of discussion around AI capabilities, insofar as people pay attention to them.

    7 votes

  16. Comment on What are you reading these days? in ~books

    deepdeeppuddle
    (edited )
    Link
    Yesterday, I started listening to the audiobook of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. One-sentence summary from Wikipedia: I’ve been a fan of The Ezra Klein Show for many years, since it...

    Yesterday, I started listening to the audiobook of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. One-sentence summary from Wikipedia:

    The book examines the reasons behind the lack of progress on ambitious projects in the United States, including those related to affordable housing, infrastructure, and climate change.

    I’ve been a fan of The Ezra Klein Show for many years, since it was a podcast at Vox, before Ezra and the show moved to The New York Times. I like Ezra’s curiosity and willingness to acknowledge uncertainty. I’m tired of political commentators whose bread and butter is perpetual sermons of anger and contempt.

    What I like about the book so far is the fundamental idea of embracing technology as a potential force for good and embracing government’s role in developing and deploying technology, as well as criticizing government’s failures to do this in the recent past.

    3 votes

  17. Comment on Planet Money buys a $137 diamond from Alibaba in ~finance

    deepdeeppuddle
    Link Parent
    That’s awesome. Yesterday I read about scientists encoding data in diamonds: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2457948-record-breaking-diamond-storage-can-save-data-for-millions-of-years/ I...

    That’s awesome.

    Yesterday I read about scientists encoding data in diamonds: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2457948-record-breaking-diamond-storage-can-save-data-for-millions-of-years/

    I thought, “That sounds expensive.”

    I listened to the Planet Money podcast today and thought, “Maybe not.”

    10 votes

  18. Comment on Planet Money buys a $137 diamond from Alibaba in ~finance

    deepdeeppuddle
    Link Parent
    I gotta propose marriage to someone just to take advantage of these fantastic prices!

    I gotta propose marriage to someone just to take advantage of these fantastic prices!

    8 votes

  19. Comment on Planet Money buys a $137 diamond from Alibaba in ~finance

    deepdeeppuddle
    (edited )
    Link
    Pocket Casts link to episode: https://pca.st/8ss45n91 Transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1240892101 Some spoilers for the episode: Spoilers It’s a real diamond, not a fake. It’s not a...

    Pocket Casts link to episode: https://pca.st/8ss45n91

    Transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1240892101

    Some spoilers for the episode:

    Spoilers It’s a real diamond, not a fake. It’s not a scam. It’s not a one-off fluke. There are many more cheap diamonds on Alibaba. It’s not a blood diamond. It wasn’t stolen. The diamond is the typical size and quality that would be used in an engagement ring.

    Episode description from Planet Money:

    The deal seemed too good to be true. There's a website that's been selling top quality diamonds at bizarrely low prices. Prices we couldn't find at any retail outlet. Prices so low, we could buy a diamond on a public radio budget. So we did. What we got in the mail was a tiny ziploc bag containing a scintillating mystery.

    On today's show: the Planet Money Diamond (or whatever this sparkly rock turns out to be). We get it analyzed by the experts at the Gemological Institute of America. We investigate where it came from. And, we dive into the economics of glittery stones. Was this a new kind of internet scam? Some supply chain anomaly? Or is something just really weird going on in the world of diamonds?

    21 votes