That’s the greater variability theory. The male median is also higher so when you combine the two the long tail to the right will be dominated by males, so will the long tail on the left but to a lesser extent.

Many IQ tests have been designed to minimize the difference between males and females, primarily by reducing g-loading. Males pull ahead after puberty, prior to this they have an IQ disadvantage. So you have to take these factors into account when trying to make a fair and proper assessment.

In theory but the difficulty in practice is that if you were to invest in local manufacturing you'd have to be sure that someone else won't be given a waver via lobbying / corruption and will then be able to completely undercut you. The current US administration lacks the credibility to give such assurances. Given existing models are exempt you're better of just delaying new models while you wait for a new admin.

I don't think it follows that a Democrat administration would reverse this.

I'm not sure the democrats could give such assurances either. If domestic manufacturing is 2x as expensive that's a lot of money that could be spent on campaign donations and still break even.

Formal thank you notes seem to have been going out of fashion, I actually like that tradition, thank you for keeping it going.

I waited for AI to get better before adopting Nix as it seemed to be rather arcane, a bit like Arch Linux, and I was worried I wouldn’t have the time for it. In preparation I shifted my development environments entirely to docker scripts where I can copy and paste working snippets from the internet.

Nix and AI is a match made in heaven and I think we’re going to see a lot of good software that’s amenable for us by AI that is both cheaper to build and easier to use.

On the up side, perhaps this disaster will make it clear that WWIII won’t be a cakewalk and we can avoid an even more disastrous war with China.

during the beginning of the last Iraq war, I was at a social event and somehow ended up saying that 'at least this is been so obviously foolish that it should cause us to really think twice about doing anything like it again', and someone 20 years my senior turned to me from another conversation and said 'we said the same thing about Vietnam'

People get complacent thinking the system just keeps working no matter what, and not that a lot of effort from talented people goes in to to keeping it working. So they vote in a total moron and discover the good times aren't innate.

I guess someone right after the Great War / the war to end all wars could be forgiven for thinking people wouldn’t be trying that again anytime soon.

What I would consider different this time is that I think the US is in the looting stages of collapse and will be unable to credibly fight such a war even if a minority wanted to.

I have a bit of a conspiracy theory about Trump starting the Iran war as a grift to get $200B appropriated only to abandon the region and have the money disappear.

My hope is that it’s bureaucratic inertia. There really is little excuse. Especially with super high voltage power lines becoming more affordable.

I mean, the US was deploying significantly more renewable energy projects during the last administration than ever before, but the corrupt trump administration stopped many of them immediately after reentering office.

The bureaucracy was moving the right direction - towards renewables - until the conservatives in this country deliberately changed strategy to emphasize fossil fuels again.

You can draw your own conclusions about motive, but this isn’t an accident.

I wasn’t even thinking about the US but consider this administration an interlude. I’m hearing other countries they’re putting the breaks on Chinese solar in an effort to build indigenous production capacity which is incredibly stupid. At least solar scales down so individuals can circumvent and get their own.

I am curious what the drawbacks are for building indigenous photovoltaic production?

Cost, especially if bootstrapping as your more expensive electricity is used to make your still more expensive panels. If you are going to onshore production it would be far cheaper to bootstrap on Chinese panels.

I'm not sure its such a bad thing for the climate though: its not like the Chinese photovoltaics will sit in a warehouse gathering dust, they would probably be sold in other nations, too poor to afford Western domestic production, at least initially. I don't see a reason why Western photovoltaics couldn't be made at the same price or even cheaper than Chinese ones eventually. Automation eventually nullifies differential wage labor and environmental safety costs compared to China.

It’s economics of scale, no one really has the money to bootstrap to get to scale now that China is already in the market at scale, not even wealthy western countries, so in effect requiring indigenous production is just a way to put the breaks on solar adoption in general. When governments have to subsidize with taxpayer money that money trends to go to donor happy companies that understand the way they make money is through political donations not efficient production. There is no real incentive to be competitive but plenty of incentive to pretend that they’ll be competitive. Any company that actually tries to be competitive will be ‘out competed’ by companies focusing on getting more government grants. The bad push out the good. There is a whole gravy train for facilitating this. Which is one of the reasons I call our current era the ‘looting stage of collapse’. People are biased to believe it will return to normal and it would be in someone’s interest to save our sinking ship, but the problem is there is still much more money to be made in looting, and it’s really hard to stop things that make so much money.

The west does not yet understand just how much was lost through financialization of our economies and the loss of our manufacturing industries, we are no longer competitive and cannot remain competitive long term. Not only can we not take on solar production but we can’t even maintain vehicle manufacturing in Germany. The US is about to lose its edge in military manufacturing and in many ways already has. We still maintain an edge in aerospace and software but we’re likely to eventually lose that battle as well.

I think there are plenty of opportunities to get to scale. Solar panel technologies evolve. Some Western company might scale up solar panels with say quantum-cutting phosphors, there is plenty of room for growth and scale up for panels with higher efficiencies.

On a wing and a prayer. Still hoping for a wunderwaffen to come along and fix everything. Why can’t we retain our relative advantages in technology we’ve already lost. Like a politician claiming they’re going to start to focus on growth, why are they just staring now, why not earlier, why did no-one else have this seemingly self evident idea…

Also ignores how captured government funding is, I was offered many millions in research grants so long as I kicked back 80% to the big 4 firm that administered the scheme. Their pitch, sure they get 80% but I still get 20% of free money. I think people really underestimate how much corruption has rotted out the west and how much of our perceived wealth is lie I am highly confident I will outlive.

May I ask what country this was in?

Corruption is of course deplorable, but a tiny quantum of solace is that it also allows adversaries to underestimate a nation state or block: when push comes to shove, a controlled level of corruption can be suspended and suddenly true productivity is observable...

An non-US anglosphere country. Our adversaries do not underestimate us, 'we' are over estimating ourselves. Corruption necessarily impairs the feedback loop of information so the participants lose the ability to properly understand their interests in a way that leads to counter productive actions even in the well intentioned.

There is the anti-fragility idea that when something is attacked it becomes stronger - the attack creates a true signal for information which is now capable of aligning internal interests. The problem is if the adversary is intelligent and avoids attacking for this very reason. This is what I believe China is doing, they keep threatening to attack to promote the various grifters, without actually attacking which would inspire effective collaboration. It was a trap and we are firmly caught in it and I know of no way out of it.

Some of us have insider connections

It was written in assembly so goes through an assembler instead of a compiler.

I assume GP is talking about the bit in the article that goes

> RCT does this trick all the time, and even in its OpenRCT2 version, this syntax hasn’t been changed, since compilers won’t do this optimization for you.

That makes more sense, I second their sentiment, modern compilers will do this. I guess the trick is knowing to use numbers that have these options.

There was a recent article on HN about which compiler optimizations would occur and which wouldn't and it was surprising in two ways - first, it would make some that you might not expect, and it would not make others that you would - because in some obscure calling method, it wouldn't work. Fixing that path would usually get the expected optimization.

I’m an unusually good programmer, I’ve worked in over 25 different programming languages and have been doing it since I was 6. I’ve spent most of my career as an applied researcher in research orgs where my full time job is study.

Finding new relevant things to learn gets progressively more difficult and LLMs have blown that right open. Even if they haze zero new ideas the encoding and searching of existing ideas is nothing live I’ve seen before. If they can teach me things they can definitely teach less experienced people things as well. Sometimes it takes a bit of prodding, like it will insist something is impossible but when presented with evidence to the contrary will resume to give working prototypes. Which means in these very long tail instances it does still help to have some prerequisite knowledge. I wish they were more able to express uncertainty.

I think the primary reason Ed Tech hasn’t been disrupted is that an expensive education is a costly signal and a class demarcator, making it cheaper defeats the primary purpose. Grade creep, reproducibility crisis, plagiarism crisis, cheating scandals fail to undermine this purpose. In fact the worse it gets the more it becomes a costly signal. As inequality increases so does the importance social signals. In many countries Universities are given special privileges to act as a gateway to permanent residency which is extremely profitable. If anything is to replace education it would have to either supplant this role as a social signal or the reward for the social signal will need to be lost and I don’t see either happening anytime soon short of a major calamity.