aaronsimpson (u/aaronsimpson)

aaronsimpson commented on Losing my son fortressofdoors.com/i-los... · Posted by u/lukeplato

I have to say I'm really humbled to suddenly see this on the front page. Today was a particularly hard day; I won't go into details but taking care of a permanently disabled invalid involves a lot of ups and downs and some fairly messy manual labor to keep them comfortable and in good shape.

I love you all. Hug your kids if you have em.

EDIT: The above blog post here was one of three things I wrote in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy to try to process my feelings and exorcise my dark thoughts. I have two more which you can find below:

The Ballad of St. Halvor (a poem): https://www.fortressofdoors.com/st-halvor/

Four Magic Words (short story, somewhat dark): https://www.fortressofdoors.com/four-magic-words/

aaronsimpson · 2 years ago

I appreciate you finding a way to so eloquently put your thoughts into words. For the longest time, I always felt like a terrible person or somehow socially or emotionally broken for being unable to respond to others grief. It's not that I couldn't imagine it or somewhat feel how they were feeling, but simply the wish that there was sentence or string of words I could put together to make it all okay. I guess anyone who has ever loved someone has felt the same :(

Godspeed.

aaronsimpson commented on Losing my son fortressofdoors.com/i-los... · Posted by u/lukeplato

zeven7 · 2 years ago

> The two most impactful thinkers/writers in my life

I am not familiar with the author, but after reading this article I am interested in learning more him and his other thoughts. Can you provide a good starting place for reading material? Specifically something that you feel affected your life.

aaronsimpson · 2 years ago

I don't know about the previous author or if it's even his best, but I learned about Lars through a Slate Star Codex guest post 2-3 years ago. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-...

aaronsimpson commented on Bing Gained Less Than 1% Market Share Since Adding Bing Chat seroundtable.com/bing-mar... · Posted by u/georgehill

magicalhippo · 2 years ago

I tried it a few times. Was useless. I asked stuff like "how to do X in Y" and it proceeded to give some generic answer about what X was and then something like "how to this in Y is specific to Y". Well duh.

I guess it can be interesting if you're after some Wikipedia-like information, but in those cases I just go to Wikipedia or similar.

Clearly I lack imagination, so, how to use this in a useful way?

aaronsimpson · 2 years ago

I think the absolute best pitch for LLMs is a natural language interface to things like PDFs. The vision of being able to "talk to" a book or paper rather than having to scroll and scroll is compelling. The same obviously also would apply to the Internet. For some reason, they just can't seem to pull that off. Asking ChatGPT to summarize an article is just a disaster.

aaronsimpson commented on Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions nytimes.com/2024/01/11/te... · Posted by u/gumby

mc32 · 2 years ago

Are you guys and gals checking your grocery receipts? Eggs have doubled over the last two years. Milk, meats, fruits and veggies... I can't think of much that hasn't gone up at a higher rate than before the pandemic.

I applaud the Fed for hiking interest rates, free money can't go on forever if you want to avoid the fate of Argentina, but c'mon, the economy is not good. It's not bad, but it's not good.

Laid off people and those fired are finding it harder to find equivalent employment like they did before.

I would bet a good roll or money that if the opposition were in the whitehouse, we'd be hearing about how shitty the economy is right now. It may not be shitty but it's not rosy like they pretend it is.

aaronsimpson · 2 years ago

This is often brought up and I'm fully willing to be shown that I'm out of touch, but where are people buying these supposed "expensive" eggs and groceries? I'll literally share my last grocery receipt (admittedly smaller due to already having most ingredients):

- Chicken thighs $6.24

- Ground beef $5.97

- Feminine items $9.97

- Bell pepper $0.82

- Lettuce $1.77

- Celery $2.98

- Shrimp $7.92

- Tortilla soup $3.82

- Yogurt (single) $0.64

- Diced tomatoes $0.96

- Black beans $0.82

- Yogurt (pack) $2.47

- Andouille sausage $3.94

Total: $51.24

Sampling from other receipts I've got milk at $3.33, lunchmeat $4.46, my last gas bill was $18.65 to fill up. So far in January, shopping at Walmart and with a crockpot, I've been able to feed myself and my girlfriend for around $139. Fair disclaimer I live in a LCOL metro but was it ever really cheaper than this?

aaronsimpson commented on Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2024? · Posted by u/koconder

aaronsimpson · 2 years ago

Predictions for 2024

- Trump/Scott P/VP ticket.

- Biden/Trump election is about as close as 2020. Trying to avoid partisanship, but I predict a narrow Biden victory.

- Biden loses Nevada, but keeps Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and very narrowly Michigan.

- Trump repeats his rage and cries of fraud at his second loss. This is taken even less seriously than the first time. Fox News in particular is more measured.

- Regardless of election outcome, lessons learned from J6 and congressional certification is far more protected by DC Police and National Guard. Protests in other cities get quelled without much fanfare. Maybe at most a high-profile shooting death.

- Settlement in Ukraine reached. Ukraine likely loses the Donbas and Crimea, but keeps Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, and Kherson. Frozen conflict/ceasefire in the vein of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia.

- China doesn't invade Taiwan.

- Google Gemini isn't as powerful as expected and Google AI efforts continue to flop.

- Hype around LLMs starts to die down a bit. More adoption, but less hype about AGI about to take over.

- No meaningful impacts to employment from artificial intelligence.

- Some kind of innovation in geothermal energy that increases its prominence above wind.

- Inflation drops to 2%.

- Fed gently drops rates - I'd be utterly shocked if it was more than 1 to 1 and a half basis points.

- Marianne Williamson drops before Super Tuesday.

- RFK Jr. campaign implodes by October with some other controversy on par with Jewish comments.

- End to conflict in Red Sea with the Houthis. Lasts until late spring 2024.

- Another mass school shooting happens in the United States.

- Israel ceases assault on Gaza with minimal progress towards any kind of two-state solution. Back to status quo with a weaker coalition behind Netanyahu.

- Apple Vision pushes VR to decent adoption amongst mainstream consumers.

- New iPhone marginally better than the previous generation.

- Bitcoin hits $70k

- Continued dip in Marvel quality, but no cease in ticket sales.

- (stealing from another comment) Dropbox LLM

- Twitter/X still exists. Advertisers probably return. Elon is still dumb.

- Trump is convicted in one of: classified documents case or defrauding American people. Potential acquittal or settlement in hush money case.

aaronsimpson commented on Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2024? · Posted by u/koconder

sAbakumoff · 2 years ago

What's your reasoning behind Biden's reelection?

Currently, he trails Trump in all swing states, right

aaronsimpson · 2 years ago

A lot of variables and uncertainty. You have to remember we live in a bubble of people ultra-focused and attached to the news. Many others aren't as focused yet. As we get closer and election season is the top story of the news cycle, I expect polling to shake out in a different direction.

To help illustrate: the election is 10 months away. 10 months ago was February 27th. Back then, there was prominent argument and speculation that Ron DeSantis was the future of the Republican Party. Look at his polling now.

aaronsimpson commented on Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2024? · Posted by u/koconder

j7ake · 2 years ago

“Live” experience through VR is going to be big.

There will be a point at which the VR experience will be better than the “nosebleeds” (they may already be).

At that point this really expands the audience for live shows.

Webcam experiences (eg having a chat with a celebrity) are going to be in huge demand once VR gets good latency and resolution.

aaronsimpson · 2 years ago

VR inevitably getting smaller and cheaper will give us the "hologram of person in the living room" sci-fi fantasy we've always dreamed of. It won't be a replacement, but similar to the way it's viewed in movies and TV shows as a "future phone call".

aaronsimpson commented on US homelessness up 12% from 2022, hits highest level since 2007 blobstreaming.org/us-home... · Posted by u/safaa1993

sandworm101 · 2 years ago

Or, take the non-liberation and crack down on the naked profiteering that is modern real estate. In many areas there appear to be lots of empty living units being kept as investments and second/fourth homes. Anyone owning an empty house or apartment should be taxed whatever amount it necessary to encourage them into at least renting that place out and thereby expanding the pool of available living units in the market.

aaronsimpson · 2 years ago

This just isn't true, especially in areas where housing costs are the worst. I don't have a citation right now, but I'm pretty sure a city in Canada attempted this (Vancouver?) and the returns were paltry, because the underlying fact just wasn't true. There is no glut of empty apartments and condos in markets like California, New York, Washington, Florida, Washington D.C., etc. full stop.

aaronsimpson commented on Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’ techcrunch.com/2023/07/24... · Posted by u/pallas_athena

sanderjd · 2 years ago

I honestly didn't even know that I could still view individual tweets. I used to go read new tweets from my favorite posters from time to time, but I haven't been back since they forced that behind a login.

aaronsimpson · 2 years ago

As soon as I deleted the app from my phone and established a "can only view Twitter on my laptop" rule, I basically stopped using it.

aaronsimpson commented on Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’ techcrunch.com/2023/07/24... · Posted by u/pallas_athena

TheCondor · 2 years ago

Does it?

Social media doesn't age well. Look at myspace. This will be controversial, but Google didn't get where it wanted/needed to be with Google+ and they ripped the cord out of the wall; it seemed like it was just google being google but it may have been genius.

I was also critical of FB/Meta buying Insta, I figured it was all going to somehow be Facebookgram but they kept it separate. FB is now for old people and Insta is probably at its peak. I will not be shocked when Meta launches a new video oriented application similar to TikTok or YouTube but somehow different.

Twitter has been toxic from day one, in fact I think the very idea of reducing discourse to something the size of a tweet is bad for the world. Lately it has been a cesspool, I get targeted political content that I absolutely never sought out, very obviously biased. That aside, do you somehow "rehabilitate" twitter? Or do you scuttle it and have a newness? Rebranding seems like the most realistic Hail Mary option, it can possibly be new without rebuilding everything. I don't think it will work and I don't really want it to, personally, but it's a bold play that is way better than continuing to watch it erode. I've heard 2 or 3 different media sources talking about twitter in the last week, partially about the "X" but also very openly about how it isn't the same thing and they don't like it. It might be too late when NYTimes podcasts are openly talking about how the reporters dislike using it anymore.

I'm not a super active participant in or consumer of "social media" but I can't remember one having a second act, once it was no longer "cool" it seemed like the party was over, did I miss one that reinvented itself? Twitter is not cool anymore.

aaronsimpson · 2 years ago

I've been on a Twitter break the past two weeks and it's been pretty glorious all things considered. The only thing I really do miss - and will miss if the platform dies - is that ability to be connected to the thoughts of people I want.

The question of what happens to the blogosphere types if/when Twitter explodes matters a lot to me. Idk if Substack is the right answer.