youzicha

[youzicha]

I guess it is hard to say what is "limiting" when there is multiple inputs? I found this article from two-and-a-half years ago, which estimates that mining one bitcoin costs $18,447, of which $8,122 is electricity and $10,355 equipment depreciation. So electricity would make up about half the cost, 44% to be exact. (The text of the article also talks about labor/hosting costs, but the formula in the spreadsheet only has electricity and chips.)

I guess this is slightly fluid though, because the mining rigs become worthless when you can buy a new one which make more bitcoins more efficiently—if electricity was cheaper, then maybe you could use old rigs longer...

For comparison, "primary aluminum smelting is highly energy-intensive, with electricity estimated to account for up to 40% of production costs."

Also: should we be concerned? I have seen the take that solar-powered bitcoin mining would be good for transitioning to renewable energy because it would subsidize solar plants that could then be used productively in the off-peak hours. Not sure if bitcoin is profitable enough to really make a big difference though. (In any case I guess it's a self-limiting problem. It would be neat if we got lots of solar power this way, and then smoothly transitioned to other uses as the bitcoin reward kept halving and California finally managed to shepherd some new power transmission lines through the environmental review...)

Should we be concerned about crypto mining eating all the cheap peaky surplus electricity? I don't really hear much about it recently, but I assume that's because it got tok expensive

uh I don't think it's a great use of it? Like to use specifically surplus electricity, you'd have to do more crypto mining during peak production right? So that means you've got chips that you bought and paid for, but are only running for a few hours a day. So... amortize the cost of chips so it's a cost per day, and then you've got to have

crypto mined during peak production > cost of chips

that seems tough! But it depends on the cost of the chips

idk, is crypto mining limited by electricity or by investment in the chips?

[youzicha]

Tea time, Erika Lee Sears

#art

[youzicha]

If the .jira.d/config.yml file is executable, then go-jira will attempt to execute the file and use the stdout for configuration.

sure. whatever. why not

#amazing

[youzicha]

Sharing a Dunkin donut with my new pal 🐜

[youzicha]

Over the course of developing Logo, Papert worked with hundreds of children and watched them progress up the ladder of abstraction. Many of these were not “smart” children: some of them were “problem” children, children who had intellectual or behavioral or attention or motivation issues in school. And Papert tells story after glowing story of how these kids figured it all out, progressed up the ladder, then went back to school and saw their problems melt away. They were changed by the experience of learning Logo, something had been unlocked deep within their minds, and they now ran circles around their former classmates. These stories are gripping, but they raise a troubling question: if Logo works so well, why didn’t it take over the world? Why didn’t it fix education? I think I have the answer. Reading this book stirred some ancient memories deep within me, which came back first hazily, then with devastating clarity. I WAS TAUGHT LOGO AS A CHILD! I had totally forgotten this ever happened, but after reading this book I am certain. Sometime in elementary school, my whole class spent a couple of days commanding the digital turtles on ancient, thrumming CRT displays in a computer lab with faded brown carpets. But something didn’t quite jive between Papert’s proud description of the system he’d created, and my own memories of using it. In the Logo I remember, there was no ladder of abstraction. In fact there was no abstraction at all. 

lol. The thesis of this blogpost is basically that "computers in school" projects of the 1980s were great not because computers are magic, but because they gave smart people from MIT a reason to teach school children.

This question "how do you teach the idea of abstraction" reminds me of a similar failure when I was 12 and trying to teach myself programming from a book. It talked about turtle graphics and I thought "too bad the programming language I'm using doesn't support turtles" and left it at that. Any experienced programmer could have told me to just implement it myself—it's trivially easy if you have the insight that it's possible to implement your own abstractions rather than working with a fixed set of primitives.

[youzicha]

and conversely, five-year-olds are basically fully grown, it's only the rest of their body that lags behind a bit...

Isn't this graph crazy. What's going on with babies. Babies have gotta be insanely stupid. Third of a brain

[youzicha]

Ooh, new Julie Christmas album coming soon. I know none of you care, sometimes you gotta post for yourself

#omg hype #I love The Bad Wife and am unable to get anything out of most of her metal collaborations...

[youzicha]

@4gravitons wrote about how every theoretical particle physics paper must include a significant calculation. Folklore has it that Wright and Felleisen ushered in an era (circa 1992-2010) where, similarly, every "programming language theory" paper had to include a progress-preservation type safety proof. It's a great compromise, because such a proof doesn't take much mathematical insight (no gatekeeping), but it's a pain to go through all the cases so you wouldn't do it unless you really believe your pet programming language is worth it. Costly signalling!

#computer science #shitposting

[youzicha]

It might take a moment or two before you notice the reclining woman in a glass box behind the concierge desk at the Standard hotel in Hollywood. The lobby is decked out in Sixties decor: floor-to-ceiling shaggy carpet, hanging bubble chairs, low plush sofas and a cactus wall. Once you approach the desk, however, you’re all but face to face with the occupant of the hotel’s infamous human fish tank, and it’s nearly impossible not to stare. Part of the lobby since the Standard hotel opened its doors in West Hollywood in 1999, this versatile glass case has accommodated models, artists, poets and everyone in between. Known as the Box, who or what is contained within depends on when you visit. It could be an artistic homage to Los Angeles, an electronic music duo performing a set or a young woman propped up on her elbows, scrolling through Instagram. There could be nothing in the Box but a mattress and pillow, primed for the next tenant.

Lobby of ‘The Standard’ Hotel (1999) Location: Sunset Strip, Hollywood, CA Interior Designer: Shawn Hausman

#??

[youzicha]

A bedroom inside the Nakagin Capsule Tower Building, Tokyo, Japan by Kisho Kurokawa (1972)

#Nakagin tower is best tower

[youzicha]

I have seen people complaining that their toddler picked up a British accent from watching too much Peppa Pig (I’m guessing this mostly refers to linking rs being reinterpreted as phonemes, like “drawring” for drawing). But at a slightly older age, right now my preschooler suddenly called me “old chap”…

[youzicha]

Conversely, in my college dorm there was a couple who coincidentally had the same surname, which seems highly deceptive. Although I think they did later legitimize it by getting married.

i dont think women should take their husbands name but i DO think married people should be legally required to have the same last name. otherwise people may have secret alliances theyre concealing from you.

[youzicha]

I feel I don't really care about doing good in an absolute sense anyway, I just don't want to be unusually bad. So I think one can rank everyone by how good they are, and then as long as you are in the interquartile range you're probably doing ok.

i feel like "but how do you quantify it" is like baby's first objection to utiltarianism and like, its common because it makes sense, but i dont think the quantification problem is as serious as it seems? like. its important if you think of it as formal theory but the property of numbers were using is not really being able to add and subtract them, were just working on orderings, if you think of ethics in terms of like, "decision theory", which act should you do. and like okay you can concoct situations that force you to construct ratios (is it better to kill x dogs or y cats?) but like. here in reality it works fine, to just talk about which action has superior consequences, and use math as a rough guide which you are loudly uncertain about.

anyway the REAL potentially fatal problem for consequentialism/utilitarianism is the question of supererogation (did you know there are TWO ers in a row in that word. fucked). at all times the BEST action ethically speaking is like. saint behavior. and were not gonna do that. so its not clear how we manage that

[youzicha]

"if you had been assigned the other gender at birth" seems awkwardly phrased... Like, presumbaly the question doesn't envisage being born with an identical body but "assigned" the other gender, the intended causal intervention is changing the body and the assignment is downstream of that. But if you subscribe to "brain sex"/"body map" theories of dysphoria, that raises the question of whether the brain got changed as well. (And I guess someone could also quibble about how big interventions one can make before it ceases to be "you".) Like, there are theoretical complications and the terminology doesn't clarify it.

[youzicha]

As far as I can tell Coyote vs Acme being shelved results in higher instant returns for WB. As they can claim it as a total loss on taxes for a savings of roughly 30-million-ish. While releasing the movie might make more than that 30 million dollars, it does so over time as it circulates through theaters and streaming services. And for some reason WB is prioritizing making the money now instead of later? It's a strange decision nonetheless imo.

I guess I mostly wonder whose "fault" it is. Is the tax system misdesigned somewhere? Should they have foreseen the loss and cut the production before completing the film? What there some exogenous shock (the interest rate jump?) that changed the calculus?

[youzicha]

I still don't really understand what's going on here. Why is it more profitable to not release a movie than to release it?

The saga of the Coyote vs. Acme movie and what it says about today’s overly complex media landscape. “Millions of dollars and thousands of hours went into creating something that could simply vanish into accounting.”

[youzicha]

The longest, cheapest, non-intersecting train trip “detour” you can take in Tokyo is by going from Mabashi to Kita-Kogane Station, traveling 1035.4 km for 150 yenalong the red path.

#someone actually did it #it takes 35 hours