I'd all the Southern Reach trilogy (quadrilogy? now) to this list. It's more on the cosmic/eldritch side, but similar sense of unknowable.
SPOILER WARNING
My interruption is that Area X/The Crawler is a probe built to study and build a bridge back to its creator. Area X is expanding because it's the inside of a wormhole. But whatever is on the other side is long dead, and the probe is acting on instinct.
Boids are little lovely simulations. This just looks like a boring force directed graph. I wonder if there is any correlation between the blandness of LLMs and weight based models.
I think that's being very generous. If you've ever been in tech support, you'll be amazed at how often you'll be asked what to do when it tells me to do X.
If they don't know how to do X, then they should be able to look up how to do X. If it's something like install 3rd party library, then that's not the first party's responsibility. Especially OSS for different arch/distros. They are all different. Look up the 3rd party's repo and figure it out.
I've worked in tech support. I get that 25-50% of the cases appear to be "read the docs to me." But the majority of those is because docs are poorly written, are overwhelming for new users, or they don't understand them and won't admit that directly.
on friday i got 2 calls saying "my phone is no longer showing me my emails, please fix" when the error message they received was roughly "please reenter your password to continue using outlook".
on wednesday i got a call saying "the CRM wont let me input this note, please fix" when the error message was "you have included an invalid character, '□' found in description. remove invalid characters and resubmit".
European languages have a future tense, which means people have different ideas of themselves in the present and future. You can even hear this in phrases like "that's a problem for future me."
While Chinese lacks the European styled future tense, ignoring time phrases, auxiliary verbs, etc. So people more clearly conceptualize their present and future selves as the same. Leading to things like increased saving.
This of course is rooted in linguist psychology, a very soft science. But still an interesting idea.
This sounds like the 'Future Time Reference' hypothesis by Keith Chen (2013). It’s indeed a fascinating idea, but it’s essentially an example of Galton’s problem (treating related cultures/languages as independent data points).
What makes this story (scientifically) great is that Chen himself co-authored a follow-up study just two years later [1] to rigorously test his own theory.
When they re-analyzed the data using mixed-effects models to control for cultural phylogeny and relatedness, the correlation between grammar and savings pretty much disappeared.
They concluded the original finding was likely a spurious correlation.
It turns out that cultural history drives both the language we speak and our saving habits, rather than the grammar causing the behavior.
Something I've never seen in these analyses is drinking. Millennials are heavy drinkers. Both craft brews and cocktails were defining generational traits. Not everyone is a drinker but it appears they are heavy drinkers compared to other generations.
The theory behind the ultra marathoners is that extreme distance running disrupts the epithelial layer and microbiome in the gut. Wouldn't drinking have similar effects?
It’s more like, millennials got older and started drinking less (as happens), and Gen Z drinks different things like hard seltzer, and also drinks a bit less overall. Plus there were just way too many craft brewers making hoppy ipa to begin with.
Unfortunately, hoppy IPA seems to constitute the majority of the survivors. I have no interest personally in suffering through another hazy sour grapefruit triple ipa, but that seems to be about 90% of craft brewery output these days.
Interesting, where I live in Brooklyn it seems this is no longer an issue. Tons of non-hoppy craft options like pilsners, stouts, lagers, etc at ~every craft brewery or gastropub.
I see one poll by a cannabis outlet claiming 46% of marijuana users are millenials (read: high proportion of user base). However, <20% of millennials smoke marijuana. [0] And another claims <40% use cannabis.
That's still below the ~50% of millennials who consume alcohol.
There's roughly 4 to 5 generations alive at any point and the middle generation is going to be considered both old and young by the generations surrounding it.
You're right. 8 year olds would call you ancient and 80 year olds would call you a baby. Middle age is relative and unless you're over 45 you don't admit to it, and then hold on to it for too long.
Well, your first Google result is a blog post that makes my point.
> For example, baby boomers are the generation with the most dramatic increase in harmful alcohol abuse. In contrast, Gen Z prefers the sober lifestyle as they are known to consume alcohol much less than any of their older counterparts, including millennials.
> Compared to non-/occasional drinking (≤1 g/day), light/moderate drinking (up to 2 drinks/day) was associated with a decreased risk of CRC (OR: 0.92, 95% CI: 0.88–0.98, p=0.005), heavy drinking (2–3 drinks/day) was not significantly associated with CRC risk (OR: 1.11, 95% CI: 0.99–1.24, p=0.08), and very heavy drinking (more than 3 drinks/day) was associated with a significant increased risk (OR: 1.25, 95% CI: 1.11–1.40, p<0.001)... These results provide further evidence that there is a J-shaped association between alcohol consumption and CRC risk.
I guess these sites don't bring up drinking because except for very heavy drinking the data says it's not a factor.
This finding is crazy! I wonder how many modern health issues have to do with healthy blood/nutrient flow to tissues, that are basically solved with either mild/moderately amounts of movement and a balanced diet.
I wonder how many of these companies burned cash to acquire customers, thinking they could jack up rates to improve profit. At the first sign of this, people jumped ship. Also any significantly large client will migrate to a lower layer to save cost. This means your business is effectively locked into SMB, because the enterprise market is just not there.
Very small, high precision spheres are hard to make. Ball bearings also fall into this category. Many modern machines depend on this. I never see it "recreate society manuals," but they should be.
The balls aren’t that hard to make [1], but doing so at scale economically isn’t something you can build with some plug and play off the shelf machinery. It takes years to assemble a functioning factory like that and tune the process before it’s profitable. All the Western companies that make them are decades old with established and largely paid off manufacturing lines but once the Chinese government decided it was a critical industrial product downstream from their five year plans, it was just a matter of time and capital. Few other governments are willing to subsidized specialized manufacturing like that so investors don’t want to risk entering an established market.
The hard part is really quality control when making hundreds of thousand or millions of balls a day, at which point all metrology equipment is basically useless except for random sampling, which means your process has to be pretty much perfect before anyone will even buy from you, but you cant slow down the process because then you’re just losing money.
>Very small, high precision spheres are hard to make
I remember this was on a list of zero-g manufacturing techniques that NASA was investigating at one point. I wonder what became of that? Normally, I'd think the cost would be prohibitive, but you can probably fit a lot of 0.1mm ball bearings in a ton of cargo.
I think a lot of Asimov stories fall into the same category. When you shape a genre, looking back it all seems so obvious. I do think Le Guin wrote much better characters than Asimov.
Just to add to this, people say the same about eg citizen Kane being such a classic but without the context of it having genre defining firsts, the film doesn’t stand out as much to a modern viewer.
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