It's hard to write something that will blow peoples' minds when you're writing in a genre that's had decades of writers mining the same material. But we ought to beware of survivor bias; the stories we remember from the Golden Age are just the ones worth remembering. Most of the stories that got published back then were derivative and extremely crude. Today, in contrast, most stories that get published are derivative but very competently crafted. I guess that's progress of a kind but in a way it's almost depressing.

I think the most recently written mind-blowing sci-fi (or perhaps weird fiction) novel I've read was China Mieville's *The City & the City*, which tied with *The Windup Girl* in 2010 for Best Novel Hugo. I was impressed both by the originality of the story and the technical quality of the writing.

I recently read Ken Liu's translation of Liu Cixin's *The Three Body Problem*, which I enjoyed. In some ways it reminds me of an old Hal Clement story in which the author works out the consequences of some scientific idea in great detail, but the story also deals with the fallout of China's Cultural Revolution and the modern rise of public anti-science sentiment. So this is a foreign novel which doesn't fit neatly into our ideas about genres of science fiction. It's got a foot in the old-school hard science fiction camp and foot in the new wave tradition of literary experimentation and social science speculation camp.

Well, it's like in Econ 101 when you studied equillibrium prices. At $3500 the number of units demanded is small, but if you dropped that to $1000 there should be more units demanded, assuming consumers are economically rational.

There is a tech adoption curve in which different groups of people play important roles in each stage of a new product's life cycle. At the stage Vision Pro is at now, you'd be focused on only about 1% of the potential market. The linked article calls these people "innovators", but that's unduly complementary; these are the people who want something because it's *new* whether or not it actually does anything useful. This is not irrational per se; they're *interested* in new shit, but it's not pragmatic, and the pragmatists are where you make real money.

Still, these scare-quotes "innovators" are important because set the stage for more practical consumers to follow. Perhaps most importantly, when you are talking about a *platform* like this people hungry for applications to run on the doorstop they just bought attract developers. And when the right app comes along the product becomes very attractive to pragmatists. This happened with the original IBM PC in 1981, which if you count the monitor cost the equivalent of around $8000 in today's money. I remember this well; they were status symbols that sat on influential managers' desks doing nothing, until people started discovering VisiCalc -- the first spreadsheet. When Lotus 1-2-3 arrives two years after the PC's debut, suddenly those doorstops became must-haves for everyone.

So it's really important for Apple to get a lot of these things into peoples' hands early on if this product is ever to become successful, because it's a *platform* for app developers, and app developers need users ready to buy to justify the cost and risk. So it's likely Apple miscalculated by pricing the device so high. And lack of units sold is going to scare of developers.

But to be fair this pricing is much harder than it sounds;. Consumers are extremely perverse when it comes to their response to price changes. I once raised the price of a product from $500 to $1500 and was astonished to find sales went dramatically up. In part you could say this is because people aren't economically rational; but I think in that case it was that human judgment is much more complex and nuanced than economic models. I think customers looked at the price tag and figured nobody could sell somethign as good as we claimed our product to be for $500. And they were right, which is why I raised the price.

Technically speaking the crime of fraud has three elements: (1) A materially false statement; (2) an intent to deceive the recipient; (3) a reliance upon the false statement by the recipient.

So, if you want to lie to people and want to avoid being charged with fraud, it's actually quite simple. You lie by omission. You distract. You prevaricate (dance around the facts). You encourage people to jump on the bandwagon; you lead them to spurious conclusions. It's so easy to lie without making any materially false statements that anyone who does lie that way when people are going to check up on him is a fool.

Not only is this way of lying *legal*, it happens every time a lawyer makes an closing statement to a jury. It's not a problem because there's an opposing counsel who's professionally trained to spot omissions and lapses of logic and to point them out. But if a lawyer introduces a *false statement of fact* to a trial that's a very serious offense, in fact grounds for disbarrment because that can't be fixed by having an alert opponent.

We have similar standards of truthfullness for advertising and politics because in theory there's competition that's supposed to make up for your dishonesty. In practice that doesn't work very well because there is *nobody* involved (like a judge) who cares about people making sound judgments. But still, any brand that relies on materially false statements is a brand you want to avoid because they don't even measure up to the laxest imaginable standards of honesty.

Now investors have lots of money, so they receive a somehat better class of legal protections than consumers or voters do. There are expectations of dilligence and duties to disclose certain things etc. that can get someone selling investments into trouble. But that's still not as bad as committing *fraud*, which is stupid and therefore gets extra severe punishment.

If I understand your argument properly, you're suggesting that things will be OK with the reefs because "survival of the fittest" will produce a population of corals better adapted to warmer conditions.

Let me first point out is that this isn't really an argument, it's a hypothesis. In fact this is the very question that actual *reef scientists* are raising -- the ability of reefs to survive as an ecosystem under survival pressure. There's no reason to believe reefs will surivive just because fitter organisms will *tend* to reproduce more, populations perish all the time. When it's a keystone species in an ecosystem, that ecosystem collapses. There is no invisible hand here steering things to any preordained conclusion.

So arguing over terminology here is really just an attempt to distract (name calling even more so) from your weak position on whether reefs will survive or not.

However, returning to that irrelevant terminology argument, you are undoubtedly making an evolutionary argument. You may be thinking that natural selection won't produce a new taxonomic *species* for thousands of generations, and you'd be right. However it will produce a new *clade*. When a better-adapted clade emerges due to survival pressures, that is evolution by natural selection. Whether we call that new clade a "species" is purely a human convention adopted and managed to facilitate scientific communication.

You don't have to take my word for any of this. Put it to any working biologist you know.

I won't return in coin by calling you an idiot, because I don't think you are one. What I think you are is too *ignorant* to realize you're talking about evolution. "Survival of the fittest" is a phrase coined by Herbert Spencer in 1864 to refer to natural selection, a concept that's in the actual *title* of Darwin's book.

Well, no *one* of us in a position to save the coral reefs. Not even world leaders can do it. But we *all* are in a position to do a little bit, and collectively all those little bits add up to matter.

Sure if you're the only person trying to reduce is carbon footprint you will make no difference. But if enough people do it, then that captures the attention of industry and politicians and shifts the Overton window. Clearly we can't save everything, but there's still a lot on the table and marginal improvements matter. All-or-nothing thinking is a big part of denialist thinking; if you can't fix everything then there's no point in fixing anything and therefore people say there's a problem are alarmists predicting a catastrophe we couldn't do anything about even if it weren't happening.

As to the loss of coral reefs not being the worst outcome of climate change, that's probably true, but we really can't anticiapte the impact. About a quarter of all marine life depends on coral reefs for some part of their life cycle. Losing all of it would likely be catastrophic in ways we can't imagine yet, but the flip side is that saving *some* of it is likely to be quite a worthwhile goal.

Well, you bringing *evolution* into the argument shows that your views are so far off base theyr'e not even wrong.

Sure, the planet does not care, but we're not asking what the *planet* should do, are we?

âoeThe number of AI related regulations in the U.S. has risen significantly in the past year and over the last five years.â

Once it is clear just how small government can be made by replacing Betty Catlady (she, her, hers) in the Dept. of WTF with AI Betty, expect important Betty protections to fill the regulatory pipeline.

Of course this isn't science, it's just wishful thinking and hand waving about things you don't actually know much about. It's probably worth noting that actual reef scientists aren't so cheerful about the prospects for coral reefs as you are.

It's not even that what you *think* you know is necessarily wrong. You're talking about about something reef scientists aren't particulary worried about: the extinction of coral *species*. In other words it's a straw man. What scientists are worried about is something quite different: a massive reduction in the 348,000 square kilometers of coral reef habitat that currently exist.

That's something that will take millions of years to recover from, and which will cause countless extinctions It will result in multiple species extinctions; sure that's survival of the fittest, but "fittest" doesn't mean "better"; it means more fitted to specific set of new circumstances, in this case circumstances we *chose to create*. And sure, in a few million years it won't matter. But that's not the test we use to decide whether anything other issue needs addressing. If someone broke into your house and took a dump on your kitchen table, it wouldn't matter in a million years, but you'd sure report it to the cops and expect something to get done about it.

No, it's not evolution *at work*. It's human intervention in the environment at work. Sure, evolution will *respond* to this intervention; if you want to see *that* at work, go into suspended animation for a hundred thousand years.

You could argue that *humans* are part of nature and therefore anything we do is natural. That's just quibbling. By that argument it would be just as natural for us to choose not to shit in our own beds.

Turbotax offers free service to low-to-moderate income people as part of an agreement it has made with the IRS. In return for this, the IRS doesn't provide free electronic tax preparation services like most other advanced countries do. For most consumers, the IRS could in fact automatically fill out their returns and the consumer could simply check it by answering a few simple questions rather than puzzling over instructions written for professional accountants.

If you've always wondered why filing your taxes couldn't be simpler, a bit part of this is marketing from companies like Intuit that make a lot of money out of simplifying the process for taxpayers.

The free tier service is something Intuit is contractually obligated to provide. Upselling low-income people to a paid service that wouldn't benefit them in any way is morally dubious at best.

Nah, I didn't. I'll be charitable and say perhaps you misunderstand the situation. You can replace peak time generation capacity with a battery charged up with quiet time capacity.

I'd love it if I could do the same thing with internet capacity that we provision in my day job.

Power usage has a daily pattern something like this:

https://db-excel.com/wp-conten...

The battery lets you take some usage from a period of low usage ( like approximately 5am on that image ) to charge up your battery array and then discharge it back into the grid at the highest usage point ( like 6pm on that image ).

A whole lot of engineering is worrying about the worst case of your metrics, so taking some usage from your best case and using it to make your worst case better is a great improvement.

You want a pre-WW2 suburb.

I was visiting Oxford UK on business and I stayed at a colleague's house which dated from the1800s. I was shocked that the front door of her house was right at the sidewalk, you could look right into her front room. But it turned out that by giving up privacy in that front room, she got an enormous and very private back yard. The arrangement was something like this. That's just a street in the area I randomly picked off of Google Maps satellite view, but I checked it for walkability: it's less than one minute's walk from the local boozer, and on the way back you can get a takeaway curry.