skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on "The therapeutic industry is platonic prostitution" in ~health.mental
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Comment on "The therapeutic industry is platonic prostitution" in ~health.mental
skybrian Link ParentI assume people had friends, but you don’t choose your neighbors. I’m wary of speculating any further about their relationships. We do know that the material existence of peasants was absolutely...I assume people had friends, but you don’t choose your neighbors. I’m wary of speculating any further about their relationships.
We do know that the material existence of peasants was absolutely awful. Half their children died.
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Comment on "The therapeutic industry is platonic prostitution" in ~health.mental
skybrian Link ParentI assume so, but I don’t think historians know all that much about what they talked about.I assume so, but I don’t think historians know all that much about what they talked about.
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Comment on "The therapeutic industry is platonic prostitution" in ~health.mental
skybrian Link ParentFor most people and most of human history, peasants rarely had money and didn’t have banks or insurance. In hard times they relied on family and the charity of their neighbors. So yeah,...For most people and most of human history, peasants rarely had money and didn’t have banks or insurance. In hard times they relied on family and the charity of their neighbors.
So yeah, relationships were vital because without them, if you got in trouble, you were dead. In good times, banqueting your neighbors was a way to build those relationships.
This mode of existence was forced on them. Being able to travel by yourself, move to a new city, and make your own friends is only feasible due to the various innovations we take for granted in modern society. (Particularly for women.)
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Comment on How the Squamish struck gold in Vancouver in ~finance
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Senakw has an unusual history. The land it is built on was home to the Squamish people until they were forced out in 1913. Almost a century later, a court case restored the land to the descendants of those who were expelled, along with almost 100 million Canadian dollars in compensation. Freed from the restrictive planning rules that hold back densification in the rest of Vancouver, the Squamish decided in 2019 to use the land to build apartment blocks that, as well as housing Squamish people, are expected to generate around C$10 billion in income, equivalent to more than two million per person.
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This is a story of a dispossessed group that is making the most of a rare and remarkable set of circumstances to generate wealth through upzoning. But it is also a story with relevance all over the world. Senakw shows that when local residents stand to benefit from development, obstacles to housebuilding can be overcome, to the benefit of a much broader group of people.
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By cross-referencing Miranda's extraordinary memory against Catholic church records, government surveys, and early anthropological notes, Kennedy and Bouchard could reconstruct not just genealogies but precise information on who lived where. ‘We transcribed all the Catholic records for the Squamish back to 1860’, Kennedy explains. Thanks to the connection between anglicized names in the church record and traditional Squamish names, ‘We could reconstruct where the houses were, who lived there, and their descendants... All of the success was thanks to Chief Miranda’.This painstaking work would prove invaluable in the court battles that began in late 1977, led by Chief Joe Mathias. It took several decades of legal dispute, but the case that turned the tide was decided in 2001: Mathias vs Canada. The case centered on the fiduciary duty of the federal government towards Indian Bands. Several other indigenous groups also made competing claims over the same land.
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In a ceremony in 2002, the Squamish Nation sailed 28 canoes to the beach in Kitsilano, a symbolic homecoming for the Squamish people. The site did not seem especially valuable: a thin patch of land, approximately half of which lies directly beneath the Burrard Street Bridge in an unusual tri-point shape. With the neighborhood zoned largely for single-family housing, observers did not initially notice its development potential.
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Vancouver is one of the most expensive housing markets in Canada. An average detached house there now costs over C$2 million (USD $1.5 million). Data scientist Jens von Bergmann and UBC associate professor Nathan Lauster estimate that the metro area has 130,000 to 200,000 suppressed households: people doubling up with family or roommates who would live independently if they could afford to. That backlog alone represents six to ten years of recent construction. In 1981, two thirds of 25- to 29-year-olds in Vancouver lived in their own households; by 2021, only a third did. Rental vacancy rates often hover below one percent; vacancy rates in more affordable housing markets, such as Austin, Texas, hover around ten.
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Vancouver never managed to comprehensively reverse the downzoning of the early 1970s, despite the huge pressure on housing affordability since. But it did find a way to permit intensive development in narrow strips, typically along transport corridors, while leaving the suburban expanses largely untouched. The city is dependent on such developments: property taxes are low, so almost half of its C$3.5 billion capital budget comes from developer payments. Through a mixture of fixed development fees and Community Amenity Contributions, which are negotiated during spot rezoning on a case-by-case basis, planners extract funding for parks, childcare centers, and affordable housing units in exchange for permission to build. They aim to capture 75–80 percent of the land value uplift. Because each negotiation process can be lengthy, the city prefers to allocate a small number of highly valuable permits, creating an incentive structure that favors concentrated towers, rather than gentle density across the city.
The downside is that the negotiation process is slow, expensive, and unpredictable. Von Bergmann notes that planners ‘typically get it wrong – they either charge too much or too little’. Getting it right requires predicting market conditions years in advance. Charge too much and the project is rendered unviable and dies, potentially taking the developer and many jobs down with it. Charge too little and the city misses out on valuable capital spending opportunities. Frances Bula, a journalist who has covered Vancouver planning for decades, describes the practical reality: ‘Big developers just cough up when planners demand.’ Smaller builders, including homeowners wishing to add small extensions to their own houses, lack the resources to play the game.
This system is what is known as Vancouver’s grand bargain, and what leads to the largely untouched suburbs occasionally punctuated with tall, thin towers. The grand bargain generates some income for public spending, while minimizing property taxes and development across most of the city. But the price is paid through worsened housing affordability and the economic costs of suppressed construction.
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While reserve land can be leased with federal permission, it cannot be alienated from the band, meaning freehold ownership cannot be transferred in any way. This means it cannot be parceled up and sold off. It also means that the land cannot be borrowed against, because securing a loan on land is only possible if the land’s ownership can be alienated in the case of default. Traditional development finance uses loans as residential mortgages. Apartments cannot be sold as condominiums (where each unit is privately owned, like a house, and each owner also has a share of the overall building), but must instead use leasehold, where residents purchase a right to live in a property for a set period of time rather than owning their home outright.
These restrictions might have made the project impossible without support from the federal government, which agreed to a C$1.4 billion loan through the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the largest in the corporation’s history. To work within leasehold constraints, the residential units were earmarked for 100 percent rental.
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Yet reserve land also offered a crucial advantage: because it is reserve land, it is exempt from zoning rules which apply to the rest of Vancouver. The Squamish Nation made the decision to ‘maximize economic benefits for the Squamish community’, which, in Vancouver’s housing-starved market, meant maximizing density: 6,000 rental homes plus commercial space. It also meant opting not to impose many of the costly mandates that cities typically require. They maintained the same safety and building standards that other Vancouver developments adhere to, but stripped away height limits, inclusionary zoning, zero-emissions requirements, parking minimums, design panels, and the years of public consultation that other projects must stick to.
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Mayor Stewart emphasized to me that Canada’s intensifying political discourse around ‘reconciliation’ was critical. Many dismissed this discourse as performative symbolism, but at Senakw it had practical consequences: ‘Promises about reconciliation forced governments’ hands when it came to enabling indigenous-led developments’. The Squamish Nation’s referendums gave the project a democratic legitimacy that Vancouver's usual stakeholder consultations rarely achieve. A city government that had spent years resisting modest density increases facilitated a far more ambitious project when backed by a clear community mandate and a compelling moral case.
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On just one site, Senakw will provide a year’s worth of housing normally built in the city of Vancouver. It functions as a sort of policy laboratory, showing that cities like Vancouver can build many more homes if the decision-makers allow it.
Senakw also offers two lessons for those of us in other cities who want to get more homes built. The first is about incentives. When the Squamish Nation’s members voted on development, they were voting on their own land, and for the economic development of their own community. They chose to maximize density and limit the costly requirements that cities like Vancouver typically impose on new developments because they would bear the costs of these requirements directly. Yet in terms of quality and safety, Senakw is just as good or better than other new developments built just across the river. But residents voting on their own projects make very different assessments of the value of some of these mandates and vote accordingly. Similar dynamics have appeared in other resident-led ballots such as estate regeneration programs in England, and Israel’s Pinui Binui program.
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How the Squamish struck gold in Vancouver
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Comment on What are you reading these days? in ~books
skybrian LinkI recently finished Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy, which is a fantasy where the Greek gods are real and can travel through time. Athena decides to do an experiment to see if Plato’s Republic would...I recently finished Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy, which is a fantasy where the Greek gods are real and can travel through time. Athena decides to do an experiment to see if Plato’s Republic would actually work with the help of various philosophers from different times in history.
If that seems like a terrible idea, well, you’re right, but it’s interesting how it falls apart and how they modify it. There are some unexpected twists. It’s quite fun.
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Comment on Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentIf you just mean “of some kind,” there are open-weights LLM’s already and some of them are fairly decent for writing code.If you just mean “of some kind,” there are open-weights LLM’s already and some of them are fairly decent for writing code.
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Comment on AI is bringing my friend out of retirement in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentCompanies do cost comparisons when deciding what to build or buy. A carbon tax would make solar look much cheaper than natural gas. (It already is often cheaper, but more so.)Companies do cost comparisons when deciding what to build or buy. A carbon tax would make solar look much cheaper than natural gas.
(It already is often cheaper, but more so.)
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Comment on AI is bringing my friend out of retirement in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentIt’s common to say that that the environmental costs are “unsustainable” as if it were proven fact, just something everyone knows, but I’ve only seen weak evidence for it. There are prominent...It’s common to say that that the environmental costs are “unsustainable” as if it were proven fact, just something everyone knows, but I’ve only seen weak evidence for it. There are prominent examples such as xAI where they cut corners, but it doesn’t seem like it’s inherent. They run on electricity and there are good alternatives. And xAI is already installing solar. It’s only about 10% of their usage, but a carbon tax on data centers would be a quite doable and politically popular way to get them to install more. (Though, probably not politically doable nationally until after the Trump administration.)
Also, we are going to need much more electricity generation anyway to convert to electric cars. There is a surplus of solar panels available from China and instead of tariffs we should be buying all we can and installing them everywhere.
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Comment on If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know in ~tech
skybrian LinkAnthropic Walks Back Policy That Could Have ‘Sabotaged’ AI Researchers Using Claude (Wired) … …Anthropic Walks Back Policy That Could Have ‘Sabotaged’ AI Researchers Using Claude (Wired)
“We’re changing Fable 5’s safeguards for frontier LLM development to make them visible,” Anthropic said in a statement to WIRED. “We made the wrong tradeoff and we apologize for not getting the balance right.”
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Anthropic now says it’s changing course, and that Claude Fable 5’s safeguards for AI development will be visible to users. If the company suspects a user is trying to use Claude to build a highly capable AI it will alert them that it’s either refusing the request, or rerouting the user to a less capable model.
Anthropic reversed the policy after it received fierce backlash from the AI research community. Anthropic has already taken steps to limit competitors from using Claude to build closed and open source AI models, but critics say that quietly degrading the model’s performance for certain users went a step too far. Claude’s coding agent has become a favored tool among developers, including those working on open-source AI research projects, and researchers tell WIRED that the company’s latest policy could have led to a troubling future in which only a handful of leading AI labs could perform advanced AI research.
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“These safeguards prevent foreign adversaries from using our most capable models in ways that pose severe safety risks. The US and its allies hold an edge in frontier chips and the highly optimized software that runs them at full potential,” the company said in a statement to WIRED. “These safeguards ensure Claude isn't used to erode that advantage—by optimizing chips developed by those adversaries, for example […] In deciding whether to make them visible or invisible we faced a choice. A hidden safeguard is harder to probe and work around. This means the safeguards can be targeted much more narrowly.”
Anthropic says that because this safeguard around AI development is now visible, it needs to cast a wider net, meaning more benign requests may trigger its safeguards. The company says it’s working to make its classifiers more precise as quickly as possible.
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Comment on Interview with Eric Ries discussing his book about corporate governance in ~finance
skybrian LinkThe author founded the Long Term Stock Exchange (see Wikipedia). I haven’t read the book yet, but I assume it will promote some of the ideas described there:The author founded the Long Term Stock Exchange (see Wikipedia). I haven’t read the book yet, but I assume it will promote some of the ideas described there:
The exchange has promoted a system of tenure-based voting rights, in which shareholders gain increased voting power the longer they hold their shares, capped at ten times the ordinary voting power after ten years. This proposal has been controversial, with critics arguing it could entrench founder control, while proponents present it as an alternative to multiple-class share structure.
LTSE rules restrict the use of executive bonuses tied to short-term performance and prohibit companies from issuing quarterly earnings guidance, although quarterly results remain required under U.S. securities law.
In 2025, LTSE filed a petition with the SEC to allow all U.S. public companies, not only those listed on its exchange, the option to report earnings on a semiannual rather than quarterly basis. LTSE CEO Bill Harts argued that quarterly reporting is overly burdensome and detracts from long-term management. The exchange’s representatives met with SEC officials in advance of filing the petition.
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Comment on Interview with Eric Ries discussing his book about corporate governance in ~finance
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
There's a dark underside to this business. It doesn't get talked about enough. I really wanted to try to do something about it, because I honestly felt like I was feeding one company after another into a meat grinder. I spent a lot of time trying to understand why are things the way that they are. And I found out through my own experience and through my own research that so many of the so-called best practices that we use today to build, structure, and govern companies — they're not pillars of capitalism, they're relatively modern inventions. But they're old enough to have a pretty good body of evidence available about how well they work, and the evidence is pretty bad.
So it seems like we're teaching people a set of practices that's almost designed to guarantee they're going to have these malign outcomes. Let's stop following these best practices so blindly. More importantly, we have to develop a new set of practices that allow mission-driven, purpose-driven leaders to create the outcomes they want for their organizations.
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I tell the story in the book of Whole Foods, which went through this self-destruction where it couldn't do what it needed to do. Its stock price fell. Activists came in and basically forced it to be sold. John Mackey's last act of defiance was to sell it to Amazon instead of the person the activists wanted to sell it to. Even in the end, his victory was kind of a form of defeat.
Today, people hear these stories and say, “Well, Whole Foods is still around.” Yes, but the ethos — the thing that made it special — has been lost. Go on the Whole Foods Reddit forum. Go anywhere where customers of Whole Foods are talking about it. You will see the evidence. It fell off the Fortune Best Places to Work list, I think within two years of the acquisition, right away. Something special got lost, even though the activists who did that attack made about $500 million in so-called profit.
I quote an economist who wrote an article right afterwards, the title of which was — forgive my language, but this is literally what he wrote — “The Greedy Bastards Won.” That phrase, the greedy bastards, is what John Mackey called the activists. He just said, “They don't care about the mission of Whole Foods. They're just greedy bastards.” Mackey framed the whole thing as a battle, the good guys at Whole Foods versus the evil villains. The press loves that framing. Even as entrepreneurs and investors, we love to talk about the personal dramas of these companies' success or failure.
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It's a classic confusion in business whether high margins are a liability or a strength. We teach that they're a strength. But then in a different class, in your MBA program, you'll learn Jeff Bezos's famous dictum that your margin is my opportunity.
So their margins were too high. Now here's the really fascinating thing. Do five whys. Why did they refuse to raise prices? Because they were afraid the stock price would go down. But why did they need the stock price to be high? Is that really an operational goal that's important to the company? People say, “Well, of course they want it to be high.” But why? Seriously, why?
Maybe because they're greedy? No — John Mackey had literally donated all his stock options to charity, saying he only wanted to work for the love of the thing itself. His personal greed could not have been the motivation.
“Well, it's important to have a high stock price in case you ever have to raise money.” There's a lot of money-burning startups out there that need it. But Whole Foods — this is the craziest stat to me of the whole story — Whole Foods was profitable every quarter and every year that it was a public company, including 2008 when its stock price dropped 90%. They didn't need it to raise money.
What did they need it for? Maybe they needed it because financial gravity makes you feel like you need it. Because if they ever let the stock price go down, it would allow activists or some acquirer — it makes it cheaper to do the thing that ultimately happened to them. A high stock price is their defense, their moat against this kind of financial manipulation.
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Going back to the “Greedy Bastards” article, the author says Mackey wanted to have it both ways. He wanted to have this lofty rhetoric about conscious capitalism and being a mission-driven company, but he also wanted to work in a bog-standard Delaware C-corp shareholder primacy organization. Obviously those two things — that chasm between the mission statement and the legal purpose — created the conflict that ultimately led to the company's demise. The author saw it as a personal drama, a personal failure. But of course, the question this book asks is, why should Whole Foods have been embodied in such a structure? Are there other or better structures available that would make these questions irrelevant? It turns out there are.
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Costco illustrates the two most important ideas in the book in one story. Sol Price understood ethos — the fiduciary to the customer, the operational commitment to quality, to trustworthiness. That was really what was embodied at FedMart. But what he didn't have was the ability to defend that ethos from attacks from the outside. It was really Jim Sinegal who figured out in Costco how to build what I call a governance fortress, that even to this day protects Costco from outside pressure.
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If you look at the data, Costco comes under attack every few years from raiders who are trying to dismantle this ethos. I quote a bunch of them in the book. Costco, by the way, has the worst possible governance rating scores from these governance rating agencies. It's considered to have bad governance through and through. So every once in a while, some good-governance reformer will try to attack, and they always attack on this basis — that Costco's governance leads to management entrenchment, which leads to poor performance.
Really? Poor performance? Costco's one of the best-performing stocks in the entire stock market the last 40 years. What do you mean by poor performance? This has become an ideological commitment to the idea of shareholder primacy, divorced from the actual on-the-ground realities that a company like Costco embodies.
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Let me tell you one exception story by way of illustrating what is going on here. In the 1920s, a woman named Marie Krogh was diagnosed with a terminal illness — diabetes, at a time when there was no known cure for diabetes. But her husband, August Krogh, had just won the Nobel Prize. They lived in Denmark at the time, and he convinced her, despite her fatal diagnosis, that she should accompany him on a lecture tour of North America. Being the dutiful wife that she was, but also a doctor herself, she went with him.
During the lecture tour, she was sitting at dinner next to one of the other scientists, who told her that in Canada, a series of scientists had isolated insulin for the first time — a potential cure for diabetes. She convinced her husband that they should extend their trip, travel to Canada, and go see this technology for themselves. They did. They instantly grasped the significance of this breakthrough, and they asked the Canadians if they could license the technology and bring it back to Denmark, not just to cure Marie, but to cure a lot of people.
Everyone agrees to do it, but they have a caveat. All four of the people involved are worried because they understand this simple truth about life-saving medicines. Imagine you have a life-saving medicine that I need to live. I have no problem with you making a fair profit by selling it to me. I want you to be in business, to have the money to build the facility to sell it to me. I'm very happy for you to make money. But I would live in fear. What if you wake up one day and say, “Wait a minute, Eric needs this life-saving medicine. I could charge him whatever I want.” I'd be powerless to say no.
So years before Martin Shkreli, they understood this was a problem. They spent the trip going back to Denmark trying to figure out, how can we structure this organization to avoid this outcome? They settled on the structure that is now known as the industrial foundation structure, where the laboratory that they built is a for-profit company — they called it the Nordisk Insulin Laboratorium — but it is owned and controlled by a nonprofit foundation. If the term Nordisk sounds familiar, it should, because this is the origin story of the company Novo Nordisk, one of the world's largest companies.
What's interesting about Novo Nordisk is it defies every inevitability story you can imagine, because it has had the idea of science as a public trust as its motivating principle for more than 100 years. All the betrayals that we've been talking about — people have tried it with Novo Nordisk. I tell a story in the book where the for-profit directors of the Novo Nordisk subsidiary tried to liquidate the whole thing and sell it in the early 2000s, when pharma consolidation was the hotness. The trustees of the nonprofit foundation intervened to stop this from happening.
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Interview with Eric Ries discussing his book about corporate governance
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Comment on Worldbuilding guide: airships - historical lessons in ~transport
skybrian LinkFrom 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Worldbuilding guide: airships - historical lessons
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Comment on Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentYes, 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.
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Comment on Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentAs 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.
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Comment on Nasdaq rewrites its index inclusion rules ahead of SpaceX IPO in ~finance
skybrian LinkS&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.
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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.
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Comment on When AI builds itself — progress toward recursive self-improvement and its implications in ~tech
skybrian (edited )Link ParentIt'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.
It seems like you’re reading that the wrong way. I didn’t intend to imply that anyone didn’t have the capacity for happiness or that friendships didn’t happen. However, I do think being able to leave the community where you were raised often has positive benefits. Anyone who comes from a conservative or religious community that didn’t suit them should appreciate this.