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Nonprofit boards are weird
With great power comes, er, unclear responsibility and zero accountability.
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How much do construction costs matter to the price of housing?
One of the goals of this newsletter is to figure out ways to improve construction productivity and reduce the costs of construction, particularly residential construction (ie: housing) - if you could reduce the costs of construction, housing costs would fall as well.
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We don't know what makes things sentient–so let's stop acting like we do
Sentience is a neuroscience question, not a machine learning one.
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Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts (2020)
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts said Richard Feynman. Feynman had a Nobel prize in physics. He was a remarquable educator: his lecture notes are still popular. He foresaw nanotechnology and quantum computing. He is credited with identifying the cause of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. There is…
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An Economy of Overfed Middlemen
A venture capitalist called Equal Ventures just says it straight-up, we seek to invest in monopolization.
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A 2030 Self-Driving Car Bet
It’s my honor to announce that John Carmack and I have initiated a friendly bet of $10,000* to the 501(c)(3) charity of the winner’s choice: By January 1st, 2030, completely autonomous self-driving cars meeting SAE J3016 level 5 will be commercially available for passenger
368
Why was western printing superior to Asian printing?
Movable type was not invented by Gutenberg but in China and later advanced in Korea, so why didn't Asia have a printing revolution?
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4 in 5 Americans who need insulin have taken on credit card debt to cover cost
The average amount of debt is $9,000.
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How Japan saved Tokyo's rail network from collapse (part 1, 1945-1982)
The most consequential project in postwar Japanese rail history (not named Shinkansen)
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PayPal closes account of UK's Free Speech Union without explanation
I interviewed Toby Young about this ironic and shocking case of censorship.
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Gemini is a little gem
AndreGarzia.com website
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Will California Eliminate Anonymous Web Browsing? (Comments on CA AB 2273)
I’m continuing my coverage of dangerous Internet bills in the California legislature. This job is especially challenging during an election year, when legislators rally behind the “protect the kids” mantra to pursue bills that are likely to hurt, or at...
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5G Skeptic
When I was working at AWS, around 2017 we started getting excited pitches from companies who wanted to be part of the 5G build-out, saying that obviously there’d be lots of opportunities for public-cloud providers. But I never walked away convinced. Either I didn’t believe the supposed customers really needed what 5G…
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The entire crypto ecosystem is a ponzi
Not really. As a counter example, gold is clear and very old ponzi. It's ok. And as a more general argument, crypto does have utility. For circumventing capital controls, buying drugs or laundering money. So there will be constant supply of new depositors who needs that and willing to pay. I would not bet on crypto…
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Mergers ruin everything
Bad merger policy is why wealth and power is so consolidated in America. But last month, two government enforcers started to turn the table on the monopolies who run our economy.
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Entitlement in Open Source
Homebrew experiences on entitled behaviour in open source, why boundaries matter for maintainers, and definitions for users, contributors and maintainers.
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My Favorite Liar (2008)
[the following recounts an exceptionally powerful teaching technique employed by an economics professor of mine at university; teaching fact-checking and skepticism by salting it into the content of his delivery]
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I was deceived about Covid vaccine safety
Covid vaccine injuries are being grossly underreported and censored: evidence from multiple, independent sources
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Exploring Mastodon
With the current uncertainty over Twitter, I'm starting to explore using Mastodon
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Protect me from what I want
Over on Mastodon, there are many people who enjoy not being in the grip of software like Facebook or Twitter that single-mindedly tries to maximize “engagement”, which means the amount of time you stare at the screen so they can show you ads. These algorithms don’t care what they’re showing you and if it turns out…
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Negative incentives in academic research
In the first half of the XXth century, there were relatively few scientists, and these scientists were generally not lavishly funded. Yet it has been convincingly argued that these scientists were massively more productive. We face a major replication crisis where important results in fields such as psychology and…
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Post-Apocalyptic Programming
In a post-apocalyptic future with no internet or stackoverflow, let's try to build a programming environment from scratch.
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“Chatbots: Still Dumb After All These Years”
In 1970, Marvin Minsky, recipient of the Turing Award (“the Nobel Prize of Computing”), predicted that within “three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.”