It’s interesting to consider whether a simulated rainstorm is in fact possible. Not a crude numerical simulation like those used for forecasting, but one fine-grained enough to accurately predict the trajectory of every drop.
You'll need to define your parameters a bit more. A simple model of each drop which gives a reasonable approximation of a rainstorm? Probably fairly possible, though far from trivial today (a rainstorm may have ~some trillions of raindrops. We can demonstrably simulate systems with an order of magnitude more parameters today, given simple enough rules). A simulation down to the quantum level of each fundamental particle in the rainstorm? In principle possible given enough time, in practice impossible as the computational requirements (absent quantum computers) are too great. And the 'in principle' is assuming that our understanding of physics at that level is accurate, which it may not be.
People make the argument that is a giant datacenter is consuming 50% of some local hydro installation, everyone else is town is buying something else that is less green.
It opens up questions about grids and market efficiency, so your mileage may vary.
> People make the argument that is a giant datacenter is consuming 50% of some local hydro installation, everyone else is town is buying something else that is less green.
I don't think that's a cogent argument. It's akin to saying a vegan commune in a small is buying is buying up 50% of the vegan food, "forcing" others to buy meat-products, and framing this to cast doubts on whether they are truly vegan. Consumers aren't in a position to solve supply problems.
Hydro power is a great thing, it was the first renewable energy that was available in meaningful quantities. However, great sites for hydro power are definitely limited. We will not suddenly find a great spot for a new huge dam. Imagine the only source of vegan B12 to be some obscure plant that can only be grown on a tiny island. In this scenario, the possible extend of vegan consumption is fixed.
In the regions where it works (PNW, Quebec, etc) we could easily build more. The hurdles are regulatory. The regulation isn’t baseless - a dam will affect the local ecosystem adversely. But that’s a tradeoff we choose rather than a fundamental limitation.
The other trade off is correlated with the energy stored : potential for catastrophic disaster in case of failure. as a society, living below is not risk free in the long run.
An individual's immediate remuneration is not the only variable in the discussion. There's a balance of power in play, in which smaller companies are on the weaker side when large corporations are left unchecked. Sure, in the short term, it's always better to get a higher paycheck. But we also need to see if this is sustainable in the long run. If Big Corps can easily undermine competition progress will be impaired, the market will eventually become less diverse, leading to fewer jobs and lower salary pressure.
>. Google comes in and offers to buy you out. You decline cause you know that they are blockbuster and your Netflix. In retaliation google hires all your staff, and sends them to the roof to rest and vest.
If you know for certain that "they are BlockBuster, you are Netflix", then why are you not cutting them a deal to make it worth them staying?
This is absolutely about workers -- specifically, companies not wanting to pay workers anything close to what they are worth.
> why are you not cutting them a deal to make it worth them staying?
It’s a fair question. Workers absolutely deserve a fair cut of the pie in that scenario. Non-competes have been pretty ridiculous lately, and companies had to provide little to no justification.
But the incentives of workers might not be entirely aligned with the “Netflix” or even their coworkers. Blockbuster wouldn’t hire the whole team unless they had to: one or two people who understood the core algorithm is enough, and for 10x their old salary it would be hard to resist. That leaves the startup and everyone else who works there out in the cold.
The second thing is that people aren’t rational expected value maximizers. You can’t pay rent with equity, and a startup may not have the cash to compete on salary.
Finally, it’s possible that allowing the larger incumbent to hire all of a competitor’s employees is actually not in their best interest. After strangling/eliminating the competition, an incumbent has no further need for those employees it poached.
> Finally, it’s possible that allowing the larger incumbent to hire all of a competitor’s employees is actually not in their best interest. After strangling/eliminating the competition, an incumbent has no further need for those employees it poached.
And even if the do, it isnt at the inflated pay rate.
When apple uses its dominant position to tax everyone 30 percent apple benefits, and the market does not.
When apple uses its dominant position to pay your team 30 percent more and stifle the free market by driving competitors out of business. you benefit, Apple benefits more and the market does not.
Is apple being a giant market dominating force a good thing or a bad thing? Your getting the high salary does not reflect your value, or the market value of your skill. It reflects apples desire to put your former employer out of business.
Besides a lot of other reasons others already commented about: the noncompete wouldn't prevent that, as Google could hire them for any position that isn't connected to search - say, Android tech support - and allow them the roof access.
You would need to ban them from working ENTIRELY, and no sane person would accept that.
Alternatively, you might realize that NDAs and IP ownership is still a thing, Google can't just copy/paste your code, and if these people are truly irreplaceable, they should either be your cofounders or founding engineers with a significant equity stake.
Imagine a world where employees can’t take a better offer, but a business could have their employees invent the next Google search, and then immediately fire all the workers that made that happen and hire cheaper ones to operate it.
Sure, if you knew you were getting a $100M exit in 5 years a rational agent would even agree to a $0 salary. A bank would gladly give them a $1 million loan for all of their life expenses until then, given the certainty of being repaid.
Unfortunately, these things aren’t certain and are contingent on many things including those that have nothing to do with technology.
It’s unfortunate because people have a bias towards guaranteed present value (cash) over expected future value (equity) which gives incumbents a natural advantage.
I feel like if you're working at a startup, you value some things more than just straight cash. Hour for hour, I'm fairly certain FAANG pays more than all but a few startups.
If a dozen people worked hard enough to gain the knowledge that gets them “rest and vest” at Google, they deserve it. Monetary reward is the reason we’re working at all. It’s not for the greater good. You’re certainly not going to convince anyone to give the government power to deny them their right to take the money and run
It's not about the workers. It's not about the market.
Hiring all the staff at an inflated rate to put a competitor out of business is good for the staff that got hired.
Without competition the dominant player makes more, without other places to work dominant player pays less.
> It’s not for the greater good.
Your not getting paid because your valuable your getting paid out because its anti-competitive. Paying you more to bankrupt a competitor is no different than dumping product to put them out of business ... Secure your market position and then jack up the prices and lower the salary.
You’re absolutely getting paid because you’re valuable, otherwise Google wouldn’t need to buy you out to enact their anti-competitive behavior. You wouldn’t be a threat in the first place.
Your critique of the use of ”bigger” in your strawman applies equally to your own use of ”longer” - neither loop will ever terminate. So in what sense is either one longer?
The diagonal proof is arguing that there is no bijection from N to {0, 1}∞ , despite the fact that both are infinite. The sense in which the latter is ”bigger” is that there are always elements left over that are covered by N.
Neither. That's my point. Literally any definition of something infinite can always be reduced to a procedure that recursively transforms or observes some prior state. To say that one of these functions can produce more distinct states than another is pointless, because the procedure that produces the most states will always be the one that you ran the most times.
There is nothing observably infinite, since it would take infinite time to observe that any given thing was infinite. The only possible proof of infinity would be a machine that runs infinitely quickly. e.g. https://qntm.org/responsibility
You can define a procedure that reaches 2 very trivially. e.g. you generate all possible 1 digit numbers, then 2 digit numbers, then 3 digit numbers, etc.
This is how natural numbers work in the first place. You're just adding a decimal point to all of the possible places it could go.
Well, you have to ask yourself what is PI really? You've been taught it is a number with infinite decimal places, however, practically speaking when you use PI you actually round. Practically speaking this doesn't matter because it's not actually possible to have a shape with infinite points in reality so you only need to approximate to whatever fidelity suits you.
How is this? This is because PI is not actually a number. It's a procedure that generates digits for approximating things about circles.
This is the same with sqrt(2). The sqrt procedure emits digits just as the procedure to find all real numbers does.
You can't "reach" PI for the same reason that a natural number can't reach "f(x) => x + 1". That is, natural numbers aren't procedures or functions.
What about 1/3, 1/7, …?
Previously outlines recursive procedure doesn’t generate those.
But yeah, if you deny existance of irrational numbers, and redefine Real:=Rational, then you can generate these “real” numbers recursively and it does follow that all infinities have same cardinality here.
Btw. what is the diagonal of a unit square formed by 4 objects at the corners? I assume it is a rational number.
Btw2. If you take that answer and multiply by itself, what do you get?
1/3 is also a special kind of procedure. It's 1 divided by 3. Either you use the isomorphic 0.3 repeater procedure where you recursively add 3 digits until you get bored or you have enough, or you use division to generate the number sequence. The fun thing about fractions is that we've worked out some ways in which fractions can be multiplied with natural numbers and rational numbers to generate new fractions, and also some fractions conveniently are isomorphic with rational and natural numbers.
Important to note: When ggp asked for a recursive procedure to generate real numbers, they wanted that exactly same proceedure would generate all reals (not special procedure for each number)
If we have special procedure for each number, then procedure to generate 1/3 is just 1/3. …of course naively assuming notation of 1/3 is as valid as 0.33333…, and that base 10 is not the only possible base.
Once you drop infinity as an axiom you have to think about fractions and repeating decimals differently.
1/3 isn't a real, it's a fraction. Fractions can be used to generate reals, and they can be used in algebra along with reals.
0.(3) is also not a real. It's also just representative of a procedure that can generate reals.
Both 1/3 and 0.(3) can still be used in algebra in the same way as before. You don't lose any capability because you can't practically expand 0.(3) to infinite decimal places in the first place.
You can have as many different symbols as you like, so long as you can actually write them on paper. As soon as you tell me that one of those symbols is a number with infinite digits I will disagree with you, given that you are unable to tell me what those digits are before the universe ends.
I can tell you that the number is 0.1 in base 3, which defines the number precisely. Or I can tell you that it in base 10, it has an infinite representation, and all the digits are 3. There, I told you what they all are, and the universe has not ended yet.
> Or I can tell you that it in base 10, it has an infinite representation,
Does it really have an infinite representation? I can't imagine an infinite representation fitting on a page. I'm pretty sure you're representing it as 1/3 or 0.(3). Neither of those representations are infinite. They're only a few characters really.
It seems to me that this comes at the price that now in your geometry the diagonal of a unit square does not have a defined length. Only an approximate one of 1.41421, but what does this approximate?
What price? In an algebraic setting you are never going to convert sqrt(2) into a real number, and in any practical setting you're going to have to round because nothing real actually has infinite precision.
It would appear that sqrt(2) does not have a meaning now, as sqrt(-1) in R. So it does not seem to matter if you do not convert it in an algebraic setting. There is no such number that you can reach with the enumerative approach, which will only give you the rational numbers. There are lots of proofs that sqrt(2) is not rational.
But in all probability we are discussing the wrong thing here. Our difference it's likely at a deeper conceptual level than this.
I’m not sure that you can. What I’ve read is that in a lot of fields, the community is small enough that you have a reasonable idea whose work you are reviewing even if the author’s name is redacted.
I’m not accusing Whitehead of the fallacy, I’m talking about the parent post.
Parent is suggesting that if we don’t take Deleuze seriously, we should also not take Whitehead seriously. (Despite Whitehead being a fav of the analytic crowd.)
But the Deleuze comparison, to the extent that it makes any sense, only applies to the later Whitehead. We don’t have to reject the Pricipia. The obvious position is that Deleuze is not-even-wrong, process philosophy is not-even-wrong, and the principia is merely wrong (which is amazing in philosophy.)
