skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Worldbuilding guide: airships - historical lessons in ~transport

    skybrian
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    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Airships and aircraft would both have to wait until the early years of the 20th century when sufficiently powerful internal combustion engines would be developed. One of the pioneers of this field was Wilhelm Maybach, who happened to be based in the same area of Germany as one Count von Zeppelin.

    Zeppelin had been obsessed with the idea of powered, rigid airships for years. After being forced out of a three-decade military career due to a political spat, he was free to devote himself to his passion, which he also saw as a way to restore his honour.

    It turned out he had exactly the right mixture to make it work. Connections, obsession, timing, proximity to Maybach for engines and the world’s greatest chemical industry for hydrogen, and most of all lunatic optimism. Even so, it was a near thing. Zeppelin’s early struggles to get his idea off the ground mirror those of modern hardware success stories. He put everything he had into the project, eventually mortgaging his wife’s estate to pay for construction costs. He struggled to win over institutions but persevered anyway. He almost failed after technical problems destroyed his first two airships, but his third finally worked in 1906. This unlocked enough public support and government funding to keep scaling up.

    [...]

    The German government poured huge amounts of money into Zeppelin construction during the war, producing dozens of ships. It was the largest fleet of rigids ever built. But by the later years of the conflict, Britain and France had fighter aircraft with incendiary ammunition which could easily chase down and set fire to a Zeppelin (a death sentence for the entire crew). More sophisticated anti-aircraft defences were built in cities, with networks of searchlights and high-velocity guns. Many Zeppelins were lost almost as soon as they were sent into the field and a morbid atmosphere developed amongst the crews, most of whom would be killed pointlessly during the course of the war. A typical example was L-19, whose first and only mission destroyed a British pub and several farm animals; during the return journey its engines failed and it crashed at sea, killing the entire crew.

    [...]

    The pattern throughout the first few decades of the 20th century was for countries to become interested in airship development, build a handful of ships that the Germans considered inferior pieces of junk, destroy some in terrible crashes, see how expensive the whole enterprise was, and give up. The cost wasn’t just about the shipbuilding. Constructing an airship hangar was a vast expense, a landing site had a ground crew of dozens to hundreds of men, and ships valved thousands of cubic feet of hydrogen into the air on every voyage for buoyancy control.

    A good example of this pattern is Britain. Large airships were seen as a way to unify the far-flung British Empire, and two parallel programs were spun up in the 1920s to build prototypes: one government and one private. The novelist Nevil Shute (best known today for On the Beach) and Barnes Wallis (later to develop the “dambuster” bouncing bomb during World War II) both worked in senior roles on the private program. The “capitalist” ship, R100, was more conservative, while the “socialist” R101 pushed boundaries with innovative structural designs and extensive use of prefabrication, as well as a more refined aerodynamic shape. However, both were significantly delayed and did not fly until 1929. In 1930, R101 crashed on its first long-distance flight to India, coming down over France and killing virtually the entire design team as well as a thicket of important officials. The death toll of 48 was a dozen higher than the Hindenburg disaster. British involvement in airship development ended overnight; R100 was grounded and scrapped in 1931. One aspect of this that was repeated in other contexts was that all the leading airship advocates in Britain were killed in R101’s crash, leaving the movement rudderless.

    [...]

    Another question is safety. In my view, this is a mixed picture. Airships were remarkably safe, given that they were well-built ships operated as civilian vessels by experienced crews. Just like other kinds of air travel it took time and experience to develop safe practice for handling airships. Most nations never had enough Zeppelins to learn these lessons before their programs were wound down: their first attempts were usually flawed designs piloted by captains who didn’t really know what they were doing. This was the root cause of many program-ending disasters.

    But with a good ship and crew, all the main risks - weather, hydrogen, dangerous thermals, engine failure, and so on - could be managed. Graf Zeppelin, which crossed the Atlantic over 140 times with zero injuries, is proof of this. The flipside is that safety was not so much about big decisions like using helium instead of hydrogen or avoiding storms entirely, but about getting every little thing right. Eckener’s airship operations were more like a modern airline in this regard. This explains the dozens of airships that crashed almost immediately after being completed.

    [...]

    This contrasts with aircraft. Early planes crashed all the time and killed huge numbers of people. Air travel got off the ground because of a population of early adopters who were willing to risk a meaningful chance of death to get to their destinations slightly faster or see the world from above. But that was OK, because aircraft were much easier to build, so huge numbers were constructed by an ecosystem of competitors. Compare this to airships, where only a couple of hundred were ever built and Zeppelin maintained a decades-long monopoly on the technological state of the art. Aircraft offered many more chances to learn how to fly them properly and so they eventually became safe, despite being much more dangerous than airships in the beginning.

    This is another point that deserves emphasis. For a couple of decades at the beginning of the 20th century, expert consensus was that airships were the future and aircraft were too short-ranged and dangerous to be consequential. “Aircraft guys” were crackpots. Compared to the devil-may-care world of early aircraft, airships were a picture of comfort and safety: commercial airship passengers went 27 years without a single injury until the Hindenburg disaster.

    [...]

    I do think airships could have played a bigger role in the early 20th century had wars not kept getting in the way. This is yet another way World War I destroyed civilization and condemned us to the bad timeline, but DELAG was doing well and likely would have continued growing rapidly had war not broken out. It’s not inconceivable that this could have led to a profitable business operating dozens of airships and transatlantic routes in the 1920s. This happened a second time with the Nazis, who screwed everything up just as Eckener was starting to succeed with the Hindenburg. But aircraft were good enough at this point that Zeppelins were doomed anyway.

    2 votes

  3. Comment on Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Yes, subscriptions are significantly cheaper than "API" prices, and it looks like they'll be closing that loophole starting with Fable, after a temporary preview.

    Yes, subscriptions are significantly cheaper than "API" prices, and it looks like they'll be closing that loophole starting with Fable, after a temporary preview.

    4 votes

  4. Comment on Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    As long as they're supply-constrained due to datacenter capacity and there are customers willing to pay, they make more money by charging more. It's economics 101. This is expense-account pricing,...

    As long as they're supply-constrained due to datacenter capacity and there are customers willing to pay, they make more money by charging more. It's economics 101.

    This is expense-account pricing, but I assume that there will be businesses willing to pay more than I will as a hobbyist. Meanwhile, I'll stick with the Chinese models I've been using.

    I imagine prices will eventually come down due to increased supply, algorithmic improvements and competition.

    7 votes

  5. Comment on Nasdaq rewrites its index inclusion rules ahead of SpaceX IPO in ~finance

    skybrian
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    S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic …

    S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic

    The June 4 decision by S&P Dow Jones Indices—the company that creates and manages stock market indexes such as the S&P 500—means that SpaceX will not gain accelerated access to potentially billions more dollars through passive investment funds that automatically purchase shares of S&P 500 companies. An exception for SpaceX could have also allowed leading AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic to gain entry not long after their own expected initial public offerings (IPOs). That possibility has now been shuttered.

    …

    However, the S&P Dow Jones Indices did “carve out one concession” by changing the investable weight factor rules for “lower-profile benchmarks” such as the S&P Total Market Index and Dow Jones US Total Stock Market Index, according to Quartz. That could allow an IPO faster entry into those indexes.

    12 votes

  6. Comment on When AI builds itself — progress toward recursive self-improvement and its implications in ~tech

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    It's a web-based coding agent called Shelley. It's open source. It's being written by developers at exe.dev to run on the Linux VM's they provide. It should run on any Linux VM, but you'd have to...

    It's a web-based coding agent called Shelley. It's open source. It's being written by developers at exe.dev to run on the Linux VM's they provide. It should run on any Linux VM, but you'd have to reimplement authentication since it relies on exe.dev's built-in authentication.

    A web UI and a cloud-based VM works well for me because I can switch between laptop, tablet, or even my phone, and it doesn't shut down when I put my laptop to sleep.

    1 vote

  7. Comment on When AI builds itself — progress toward recursive self-improvement and its implications in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I've read about people who have connected a coding agent to Slack (or similar team chat) so that the team works together more, and they seem to like the result. I'm a hobby programmer working...

    I've read about people who have connected a coding agent to Slack (or similar team chat) so that the team works together more, and they seem to like the result.

    I'm a hobby programmer working alone, so that doesn't really work for me, but I think it shows that we haven't figured out the best way to use these tools and there will be more exploration of different ideas on how to organize the work.

    3 votes

  8. Comment on When AI builds itself — progress toward recursive self-improvement and its implications in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Some people claimed that the code was trash, but is that really proven? I didn't follow it all that closely, but there was a claim that using a regular expression was somehow wrong and it seemed...

    Some people claimed that the code was trash, but is that really proven? I didn't follow it all that closely, but there was a claim that using a regular expression was somehow wrong and it seemed more like a hot take.

    2 votes

  9. Comment on When AI builds itself — progress toward recursive self-improvement and its implications in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    You can think about it if you want to. I usually ask the coding agent to write a design doc first because I care about how it will be implemented. It will go through multiple drafts. For bug...

    You can think about it if you want to. I usually ask the coding agent to write a design doc first because I care about how it will be implemented. It will go through multiple drafts.

    For bug fixes, I ask it to explain the bug and proposed fix before giving it the go-ahead to fix it.

    3 votes

  10. Comment on When AI builds itself — progress toward recursive self-improvement and its implications in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Big tech companies have lots of internal code that is never released as a product. I think it's fair to ask what they're getting for it, but we can't really tell from the outside.

    Big tech companies have lots of internal code that is never released as a product. I think it's fair to ask what they're getting for it, but we can't really tell from the outside.

    2 votes

  11. Comment on When AI builds itself — progress toward recursive self-improvement and its implications in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    It seems like the paragraphs you quoted also say that it’s not 8x productivity, and therefore it wasn’t “completely glossed over?” As for the quality of the code, I’ve heard bad things about...

    It seems like the paragraphs you quoted also say that it’s not 8x productivity, and therefore it wasn’t “completely glossed over?”

    As for the quality of the code, I’ve heard bad things about Claude Code and prefer a different coding agent, but we don’t know about their internal codebase.

    3 votes

  12. Comment on When AI builds itself — progress toward recursive self-improvement and its implications in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Hmm. Okay, let’s hear the details on what they allegedly did.

    Hmm. Okay, let’s hear the details on what they allegedly did.

    3 votes

  13. Comment on When AI builds itself — progress toward recursive self-improvement and its implications in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    It sounds like you will be skeptical no matter what they do?

    It sounds like you will be skeptical no matter what they do?

    7 votes

  14. Comment on What do you think of robots in the military? in ~tech

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Putin miscalculated, apparently due to having a very old-fashioned idea of imperialism. Such wars are no longer profitable. Trump miscalculated, apparently because Israel talked him into thinking...

    Putin miscalculated, apparently due to having a very old-fashioned idea of imperialism. Such wars are no longer profitable.

    Trump miscalculated, apparently because Israel talked him into thinking it would be easy.

    If leaders didn’t make blunders, maybe there wouldn’t be wars?

    1 vote

  15. Comment on What do you think of robots in the military? in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    This isn’t unique to the US. No wealthy country in the modern world is self-sufficient. The benefits from trade are too strong to give up.

    This isn’t unique to the US. No wealthy country in the modern world is self-sufficient. The benefits from trade are too strong to give up.

    2 votes

  16. Comment on The rise of build-to-rent housing in ~finance

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Maybe that's true, but I think renters having a place to live is a good thing. The previous owner sold it to a corporation that built two small houses, so now two renters can live there. That...

    Maybe that's true, but I think renters having a place to live is a good thing. The previous owner sold it to a corporation that built two small houses, so now two renters can live there. That seems good for them.

    If the property had been developed as a single, more expensive home, and sold to someone who could afford the mortgage, it seems like that would be increasing inequality and shutting out the renters?

    (Also, when a home owner pays their mortgage, isn't that money leaving the area too?)

    2 votes

  17. Comment on The rise of build-to-rent housing in ~finance

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I don't like the idea of assuming renters are second-class members of the community. Whether you rent or own shouldn't matter.

    I don't like the idea of assuming renters are second-class members of the community. Whether you rent or own shouldn't matter.

    5 votes

  18. Comment on The rise of build-to-rent housing in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Maybe the people who move in will be part of the community though?

    Maybe the people who move in will be part of the community though?

    3 votes

  19. Comment on Tokyo land is still >$85 million an acre in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Thus the right question isn’t whether YIMBYism would lower the user cost of housing—that’s the whole point of the YIMBY movement and the unanimous upshot of the academic urban economics literature—but whether it would lower the value of land overall. The answer will almost certainly turn out to be no, because higher land prices are substantially severable from, and can coincide with, lower structure prices. And Tokyo, the world’s largest city and the only one that features anything like a realistic best-case version of housing abundance at megacity scale, is the cleanest place to see it.

    [...]

    By the standards of Anglosphere megacities—New York, London, Toronto, LA—Tokyo housing is famously cheap. Builders can put up small-lot single-family homes, midrises, microapartments, and single room occupancy-style shared housing units with ease and in large volumes. (High-rises are not allowed by-right everywhere, so this isn’t a pure laissez-faire experiment, just the closest real-world example.) If “Tokyo regulation” is what real-world YIMBY victory looks like in a global megacity, it’s the best dataset we have.

    [...]

    The famous (relative) cheapness of Tokyo housing is not a story about cheap land. A one-acre detached house in central Tokyo would cost more than $100 million in dirt before you broke ground. The land is pricey but the structures are cheap. Admittedly, Tokyo’s rents and prices are not as cheap per square foot as buildings in the US Sunbelt’s midsize cities, but cheap by the standards of any 10-million-plus Anglosphere metro area. Tokyo built its way to relative affordability without ending up with low land values, and the values themselves look reasonable for a productive, agglomerated megacity that simply didn’t artificially restrict its own supply.

    [...]

    When policymakers upzone widely with by-right permitting across a high-demand metro, two things should happen at once. Measured per-acre (like farmland), land value rises, because the parcel has been granted a valuable option to host more buildable area. Land value measured like NYC-area developable land per buildable square foot falls, because that higher per-acre value is being amortized over much more floor area.

    These move in opposite directions, and neither one alone is “the land price” in the sense political conversation usually means. This distinction dissolves a lot of the political-economy panic around housing abundance. Again, land prices quoted the way NYC land brokers quote them, on a “Zoning Square Feet” or “Buildable Square Feet” basis, will fall even as the total value of land is at least stable or rises in the metro area being upzoned.

    [...]

    If American single-family homeowners in the cores and first-ring suburbs of New York, San Francisco, Boston, or LA were maximizing the dollar-denominated asset values Fischel says they care about, they would be voting to become like Tokyo landowners — to unlock the redevelopment option on their parcels. They are not. Whatever they’re maximizing, it isn’t profit. (See Agenda for Abundant Housing for a full-length argument.)

    That’s not a fatal blow to the homevoter framework if we’re willing to relax the “objective function” of voters from strictly defined profit-maximization. As any good undergraduate economics professor will remind a student who discovers people valuing non-pecuniary interests: “Firms maximize profit. People maximize utility.” This is of course the beginning, not the end, of the question: It is the task of the other social sciences and humanities to help economists figure out what it is that people see as utility-maximizing or otherwise in their best all-things-considered interests, when consumers are not behaving in a way that maximizes apparent pocketbook dollars and cents.

    4 votes