This is a strange question. It's like asking if Christianity has any basis in scientific and objective reality, which as a religion it does not, none do. It doesn't even make any sense to ask the question, like what does an objective reality of a religion even mean? You explicitly disclaimed discussion about the cognitive benefits of its practice so I'm not really sure what else you could be asking concretely.
I suspected that most people on HN viewed Buddhism the way you do: as something with no basis fundamentally in science and therefore reality but felt that the practices have side effect health benefits or other benefits undiscovered by science.
From the sample size of people who responded, I would say I am wrong. A good amount of HNers believe it literally as something beyond science.
Reminds me of the movie Man from Earth (don't watch the sequel). The precepts of both Christ and the Buddha are quite striking in their similarities, but perhaps both are a manifestation of an even deeper principle, of what it means to be a good person.
“To most people who are even moderately experienced with entheogens, concepts such as awe, sacredness, eternity, grace, agape, transcendence, transfiguration, dark night of the soul, born-again, heaven and hell are more than theological ideas; they are experiences.” - Thomas Roberts
I recommend the book "Sacred Knowledge" by Willian Richards and the concept of cosmic unity (as the first "birth matrix") from "Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD" by Stanislav Groff.
The source of that comes from somewhere too, as it's still a human made construction. It seems like being "good" is simply advantageous to us as a species, hence why it is in all religions.
Imagine if we had passenger rail like Asia does, it would be amazing. But sadly it's all a matter of political will, the US simply does not want to create such a rail system where we can take bullet trains from NYC to LA.
There is no world where bullet trains between NYC and LA would make any financial sense at all. The trains can't possibly go fast enough for passengers to be satisfied with the speed (even maglev isn't fast enough), and the cost of track construction and maintenance would never be paid for by ridership.
I live in Japan; bullet trains are great here, but the distances they cover are quite short by American standards. Extremely high ridership, with trains covering relatively short distances between extremely populated population centers (the Tokyo metro area has 38 million people for reference) means the trains operate at a profit. That could be done in America, maybe, but only between select cities that aren't too far apart, such as DC and NYC and Boston. Even here in Japan, no one is taking the shinkansen between far-apart cities in the north and south; they use inexpensive and faster domestic flights instead.
In China it's a matter of politics rather than financial sense, of unifying the country hence why they have them in ethnic minority areas too. The trains would be like roads, sure, most people wouldn't take them from one end to the other, A to Z, but there are enough people to take them from A to D, J to N, Q to T, so to speak. If one could commute in one hour from Boston to DC for example each way, daily without flying, it opens up more economic opportunities in total. But like PG said, the competition to an airline isn't a car or a plane, it's Zoom.
Zoom isn’t a replacement for in-person meetings all of the time but it’s pretty good for a lot of purposes. I’m on a non-profit board and we do have a couple meetings a year when we ask people to try to make it in person but the rest is planned to be virtual.
I heard something like that about the Concorde at the Air and Space Museum. What killed it was not fuel costs, but cheaper long-distance phone calls and fax machines.
But if a country takes the Chinese approach and pushed inexpensive rail as a way to open new economic opportunities, the idea of flying as your daily commute moves from ridiculous to feasible (if you replace the airplane with a train).
No, it was definitely the cost to operate it and the sonic boom associated with flying at that speed. The company operating the Concorde never made a profit.
Yes, I can see how some people might think the same system would work in the US too, with a HSR network going from Boston to LA, with stops along the way in NYC, Chicago, Louisville, St. Louis, Denver, and maybe some smaller cities too.
But China has a much larger population than the US, by far, and an authoritarian government that has no problem using the "build it and they will come" business model for large infrastructure projects that may or may not work out as planned and no worry about opposition from local politicians, NIMBYs, etc. Don't forget, most of their population is concentrated on the east coast; the inland areas are relatively unpopulated. And they don't have a population that's been conditioned from birth, ever since the 1940s, to think that automobiles are the mode of transit that society should be based around.
So even if they did build an HSR network across the US, I don't think it would work out. How much travel is there between Denver and St Louis, really? A lot of the intra-US travel is really between places on opposite coasts, or on the same coast, because that's where the population is.
Denver is too far away from any other large city to make HSR work. At the distances involved everyone will fly. Maybe you can make it work within Denver, but not to get to any other state as there is no city of any size anywhere close.
> the distances they cover are quite short by American standards
Typical distances are about the same as SanFrancisco-LA, LA-Phoenix, Phoenix-LasVegas, Dallas-Houston, Houston-New Orleans, Portland-Vancouver. The longest service is 650 miles -- around the Atlanta to New York, Chicago to Washington DC, San Francisco to Portland, Austin to Kansas City
This is not really true, at least for the northeast corridor. Amtrak is the fastest way to get from DC to NYC for example due to traffic in the city if driving or taking the bus, and the distance from the airport (LGA or JFK) to the final destination in the city if you're flying. I take Amtrak somewhat begrudgingly because it often can be way more expensive than flights which are subsidized generally speaking over passenger rail these days, because it's simply faster.
And I honestly don't know what adventures people are talking about, most people keep to themselves. I've had more stranger experiences on flights than I have on Amtrak but maybe it's different in the West Coast.
This only applies to sleeper car routes. You're on the traib for 2-3 days, mostly with no cell service. If you eat in the restaurant car, they will seat you with strangers. If you sit in the observation car, there's a bunch of other people sitting there too.
I did NY to Miami 18 months ago having spent a week in Washington/NY and was due for 3 days in Miami before flying home.
Saturday morning in NY looking at a few sights I hadn't seen (Trinity Church), then a relaxing train down to Miami. Beat flying and spending Sunday in a hotel room.
I didn't sit with anyone else in the restaurant car, but that does sound an interesting way to meet people from a whole different world. The Friday night in NY though I did sit at a bar next to other people, so I guess that was horrifying?
Had i been that against it though there was an option to eat in my room.
I usually take the Regional on my own dime though last trip I got a deal on the return leg on Acela. The downside of Amtrak for me is that the Boston south suburban station is an hour drive in basically the wrong direction. But I hate hate driving into Manhattan.
Do you ever consider driving to New Haven and taking Metro North the rest of the way? IIRC it's as fast as Amtrak if you're on the Super Express train.
it's very expensive though. i used to live in philly close to 30th and had a reason to go up to nyc regularly close to penn, essentially perfect for taking amtrak, but ended up taking boltbus just because the price difference was very significant and time wise it was only like 30-45min slower.
Pro tip for those who like risk and are traveling regularly for non timely purposes they have dynamic pricing that rewards literal last 5m. I do Amtrak for like $15-40 NYC-PHL. You have to be signed in to the app otherwise they won't give you the sweetheart deal. Refresh reguarly the price changes constantly in the last 3-4h though I'll typically rock up to Penn and buy one 10m before.
I spent the entire trip on the Acela Express first class (work was paying) from NYC to Boston talking to an absolutely fascinating man headed to his 60th MIT reunion.
I spent the entire trip (including a 4 hour delay where we didn’t move) in the cheap seats from Atlanta to New Orleans smelling the farts of someone with serious GI issues while a college kid walked up and down the aisle spraying axe body spray to drown out the smell.
Many many years ago I took the train from San Luis Obispo to Sacramento and enjoyed a meal in the dining car, with set times and seating assignments. It was a really interesting conversation with my randomly chosen tablemates. Sadly I don't think they do that anymore.
Unless you're using their API (in which case there's always platform risk, same as before), this is not an issue. There are lots of half assed implementations of ideas by the big companies that smaller companies run circles around, Innovator's Dilemma was literally written about this.
In my opinion Christensen wasn't talking about outsourcing your entire development process to a competitor with much deeper pockets, giving them the ability to turn off your development at will [1], and then running rings around them. I'm sure you're familiar with his story about Dell and Asus. This is worse.
[1] Unless you're assuming that you maintain control over your technology while outsourcing most of the development thinking to a rented AI? Times have changed, and the API is not the only issue anymore.
What is the issue? Local models still exist and will continue to exist, and even if they don't, good old fashioned hand coding will never go away. The point is even AI companies are run by people and one company cannot make every product well, there are always gaps in the market that are exploitable.
You should ask r/LocalLLaMa, they have more benchmarks such as this [0]. As an aside, the other comments in this HN comment section are useless, I mean, one is talking about using cloud models when the question is specifically about local models, which have various reasons to exist beyond cloud models; and another one is about not buying any more Apple products, like, that's irrelevant to the question at hand.
I read the book and really enjoyed it, but I heard the movie isn't really like the book, especially not enough of the science stuff unlike the Martian movie which does indeed have more of the science stuff. Those of you who read the book, what do you think of the movie?
It’s a movie, not a book. The audio book is 16 hours runtime. The movie is 2 hours. Some things were always going to be left out. The details of the science stuff was one of them. It works better in a book narrative where the process is told than a movie where it’s visual and you have to show.
The Martian book has more of the science process than PHM book does to begin with.
The movie hit all of the primary points but never got into the details. If you read the book you can fill in the details. I imagine that a lot of people watching the movie didn’t know why some things were happening. Maybe some will be interested enough to read the book or the audiobook. If not, they had a good experience in the movie anyway.
What bugs me about the editing in the movie is they gave only a couple of seconds of screen time for key plot elements like the nitrogen resistance breeding and how/why this would cause issues for Rocky. It made the last 20% of the movie less coherent for anyone who hasn’t read the book.
I read the book on release and loved it. The main themes and plot points are present in the movie, though it's overall a bit less nerdy and a bit more comical than the book. I think it is easily one of the best, most enjoyable sci-fi movies released this decade.
Heck, you don't even need a plot that hangs together. When I was a kid I had trouble figuring out why i loved the original Dune movie while everybody else hated it.
It was a bad movie because the plot didn't hold together. But the visuals and the characters were awesome. As an adjunct to the book it was great. It just didn't stand alone.
Hail Mary as someone who has read the book is a different experience than someone who hasn't. It brings the book to life.
Agreed. It seems the Olympics really bolstered both Japan and France from before, where even in remote regions of Japan I had no issue speaking basic English for things I needed.
Yes, Veblen goods, and there are examples of cloning Hermès bags for example (still by hand) where they're much cheaper yet took the same amount of time to create.
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