Dominic Tarr
@dominictarr
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high functioning weirdo https://t.co/IjGNgypcEC retired from tech!
New Zealand
Joined April 2010
quitting twitter. going back to mass forwarding memes via email
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"existential threat" sets the bar too high, "civilization collapse" is better because there have been many, so we can reason about it. If we can prevent civ collapse, that implies preventing extinction too
Which of the following categories do you think presents the greatest existential threat to humanity?
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these waves a huge, but a smaller ship would be sailing the other direction by this point, with the waves -- they are big, but long, so you can go up and over them more smoothly than into them
I really don’t understand how dudes traveled the seas 500 years ago
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in a scarcity-based economic paradigm, knowledge is priced in a zero-sum competitive environment. but in an abundance-based economic paradigm, where everyone has their needs and desires abundantly, preponderantly met, spreading knowledge has maximum deep benefit; hoarding
72. using information access hubs like SciHub, LibGen, and torrenting are illegal but arguably morally defensible under philosophies that are not well articulated or evenly distributed yet. our societal attitudes towards copyright + information-scarcity will be seen as a dark age
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it's the height of hubris to think you can cast shade on the sun
a plant has more energy flux per unit of mass than the sun 🤯
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on the other hand, imagine all the amazing discoveries that havn't been made because the potential discoverer had to take a steady job to pay the mortgage instead of do fun research
Sorry to bite the 'great men theory of history' bait, but I'm suddenly curious if there's a major scientific or technological discovery where we think if the person who made it got hit by a bus it might have taken decades or centuries more
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Indigenous American food is amongst the best in the world just by virtue of Mexico and Peru, any arguments of foreign culinary introductions in those regions can be immediately dismissed as half of all food elsewhere is comprised of New World ingredients 🤷♂️
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Much of our knowledge of ancient individuals is limited to the elite, people like rulers/generals. Yet occasionally we come across archaeology that reveals a tiny glimpse of the life of a regular person. Meet Onfim! He lived 800 years ago and boy, did he find homework boring.🧵1/
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learn to sail in one day plus the rest of your life
This cost next to nothing. No license. The wind just pushes it along. Anyone can learn how to sail one of these in < a day Where I was born everything about this was impossible and forbidden and uninsured and unlicensed - so keep going, whatever your thing is
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If a tiger is about to eat you, dont worry, it just means your matter is about to become part of a tiger
artificial neural networks are not actually intelligent, they’re just approximating functions by stacking differentiable functions in layers with an optimizer
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there is an easy way to fix this: just reduce US consumption in half
Is this the most important chart in the market? The US accounts for 29% of the world’s consumption while producing 15% of global goods. Meanwhile, China's share of global consumption is 12% while the country accounts for 32% of world goods production. In other words, China’s
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a big part of this is *when* to make it
went to the goth club and asked men what masculinity means to them. answering included ‘making a good grilled cheese’
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A very good question. I think autistic people would have been highly valued as repository of your cultures oral history, for just one example
What did autistic people in ancient times hyperfixate on
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Sure, colonizing space is an ambitious goal, but you know what is EVEN MORE ambitious? Utopia On Earth
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high-leverage political move you can make in your city as a random programmer: create a website called SeattleStats or whatever and publish easy-to-consume graphs of the metrics that you actually care about then do a guerrilla QR code poster campaign to make it known
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hypothesis: everyone is average actually, but end up paired with people who are *into* them. so they get subjective evidence that they are actually hot. I think that's actually the interesting question here, attraction is an individual thing, don't model it as objective.
Results from the 'how hot are you' survey are out! I asked people "rate how attractive you are on a 1-10 scale". Then I took photos of them and asked other people to assign them ratings. Here's how accurate people were. Note the difference between men and women. 1/
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I have long been wondering why the USA abandoned manufacturing, and I think I figured it out. it worked with fixed exchange rates, but switching to floating exchange rates and having a strong dollar benefits importing not exporting
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This is a truly wild article. About 5% of cyanobacteria fished from the ocean are connected via nanotubes. These nanotubes are made from lipid membranes. Also, E. coli will sometimes grab onto microbes of *other* species, using these nanotubes, and share nutrients.
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so we are not the only species to use fire
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Baffled that anyone could look at the extreme diversity of body modification practices across cultures throughout history, many of which cannot be tied to ecological factors nor fit modern beauty standards, & claim socially learned preferences are unimportant or always functional
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