Protip: you can turn a box fan into an incredibly effective air purifier[0] (particle measurements in thread). The one they show is pretty elaborate, using 4 filters and some construction, but you can also use a single filter and slap it on the back of the box fan and have similar results. The air purifier industry is more about aesthetics than it is function.
Almost all of these review sites, not understanding the physics involved, believe a HEPA filter sieves particles down to a size of 0.3 microns, which implies that anything smaller passes on through.
This is utterly false. HEPA filters are measured at the efficiency of what’s known as the MPP (the Most Penetrating Particle size). It’s the hardest particle size to capture as it can get by the two methods used to capture large particles (impaction), and smaller particles (diffusion).
Considering almost none of the air in a room is passing through the filter at a given moment, the efficiency of the filter is less important than how much air it moves through the filter media per minute, which IKEA have favoured here.
Essentially this filter performs close to par with more expensive units, while using less energy, and having dramatically lower costs for filter replacements when due.
What they don’t do is give reviewers either kickbacks or basic physics lessons.
Idk this "toshiba" AC has a built in heat pump and operates at super quiet levels.
Would I call it a "breakthrough", likely not. But it is a meaningful improvement over an AC released decades ago.
It's by a guy who was a counselor for abusive men, often ones attending therapy as part of a court order. It is the single most astute book I have read. He spent more than a decade listening to people's bullshit, and in this book he breaks it down brilliantly. Particularly relevant to you are the sections on how abusive relationships benefit abusers and why the abused stay so long.
I attended a talk by Richard Garfield, the game designer behind Magic: The Gathering. He made a point that adding randomness to a game can be a way to give it that property of "easy to learn, hard to master", and in turn make it easier for a community to grow around the game. When you add randomness, it becomes possible for novices to sometimes beat more experienced players through sheer luck. Contrast that with e.g. chess, where it doesn't take much skill difference before the most skilled player is almost certain to win. So randomness makes it easier for newcomers to get the occasional win, to keep them motivated while learning. But at the same time, randomness can make it harder to master, because the cause-effect-relationship between good decisions and good outcomes becomes blurred, like the article points out, defeating the trivial "reward function" we usually use for evaluating our performance. It takes a lot of discipline to say "I won, but it was luck, because I actually misplayed" and learn from that. And on top of that, high level play will become a game of analyzing and estimating probabilities, minimizing or maximizing variability depending on the strength of your position, basically embracing randomness as a gameplay element to be understood and sometimes even manipulated, despite being so intangible compared to most other gameplay elements. So used the right way, adding randomness to a game can both lower the barrier of entry, and raise the skill ceiling at the same time.
Index investing will work, if you live for a long time. The problems are, we do not live infinitely, and the average person does not have the stomach to see their investment going down for years, unless that investment is small enough to tolerate (in which case it is not enough to make a big difference, for most people).
What I think will work - not claiming that it will actually work - based on history:
Invest in companies that are generating a lot of cash and a lot of profits, have a moat/USP/technology advantage, and are at the forefront of where the world is headed in terms of trends, or at least are following a sustainable trend. Yes, you need to identify the company. Yes, you need to take decisions: INTC vs AMD (1980s), YHOO vs GOOGL (2000s). But it gives you a much better chance of seeing a profit in your lifetime than index investing. You can still index invest, but only an amount you can "set and forget". This gives you the best of both worlds.
Edit: (1) What I posted above is for long periods of no movement of stocks except downwards, as I believe we are going to see. (2) Index investing will work eventually and that is what I said above as well. The point is, the time period required for that. (3) I thought of posting this on my blog tomorrow, but it is past midnight here, and I wanted to see what HNers think. It is interesting to see the different opinions. Time may change some of your opinions (not about "index investing will not work" - that is not what I said above - but rather, about the protection offered by diversification, and what diversification actually means. Also, quoting this part again: "the average person does not have the stomach to see their investment going down for years, unless that investment is small enough to tolerate (in which case it is not enough to make a big difference, for most people)").
Peter Thiel once said something along the lines that nobody is against aging research, because in practice what you’re solving for are problems everybody wants cures for, like Alzheimer’s, cancer, Parkinson’s, etc.
I often think about that quote because aging is such an intractably hard problem, we’ve sort of collectively rationalized it as something “good”. You see it in many religious traditions. In the zeitgeist. That somehow death gives life meaning. Makes it good.
But I’ve never found anybody who thinks cancer is a good thing. Nobody sane at least.
I’ve thought for a while now that every philosophy problem is in some sense, just a health problem waiting to be solved.
Occasionally I think about the Bible too and the way Christ (regardless of your religious beliefs) upended this tradition of rationalizing death as good. There’s a line in the Bible that’s the shortest verse in the English version: “Jesus wept.” And he was weeping for Lazarus, a man who died (who he could bring back to life effortlessly); in some sense a true condemnation of death as evil. Something even a god would weep over.
I think about the future often too; the way immortality will finally be achieved. There’s so many complications when it comes to aging, and so much we don’t know about the human body, I wonder whether humans will be involved at all; whether machines will silently develop cures while our bodies lie in a metal tomb, explaining to us what happened afterwards in terms we can understand.
I think it’ll happen someday. But I don’t know if it’ll be a year or 100 years from now.
I certainly hope it’s soon. Some days I feel like I’m at the edge of an eternal history.
I already had a different side project with 300k users so it was incredibly easy to find PMF fast because I just emailed them.
Tech choices: I never reinvent the wheel. I just take working pieces from other work that I've done and glue it together. Anything custom, I'll read how others do it.
Lessons: I probably should've chosen a different market. If I had targeted companies and taught their employees professional education rather than poor amateur voice acting hobbyist, I'd probably be making $20M ARR. But I don't mind, this is still fun.
All the Web3 criticisms remind me of my experiences with Star Trek.
For context, I never watched Star Trek. I'd read stories about fans and it always struck me as the dorkiest possible show, with unabashed nerdiness making something like the Big Bang Theory look like a sophisticated work of art.
But one day, I listened to a podcast about strength training and a question came up about which Star Trek leader the host liked more. And I was struck by how they described them. They were leaders. Competent, skilled, and wise men.
This is not the impression I got listening from their rabid fans who were at their worst, at the far end of this (at least on first and worst impressions).
I'd watch some scenes and it was in some respects closer to sci-fi Shakespeare than anything else. And so this gap between reality and impression stuck with me. How could I be so swayed by the worst version of something that never existed?
Years later and the rabid users of cryptocurrency rile me up. There's so much abuse and corruption happening in this space, metered with gambling addictions and delusions.
But the math and incentives are there. It would hard for me to make a case that eventually cryptocurrency will fail. There's a wide surface area of financial problems that even fintech hasn't solved yet. And a whole bunch of problems who we don't even realize exist that can one day be solved by these new mathematical properties embedded into software.
So I'm not too keen on stepping too deeply into the cynicism. I'd like to wait without a final judgement on what it might become.
I don't want to miss out on who Captain Picard might become.
It’s geared to freelancers but honestly it talks about a lot of soft skills that are probably equally as important as technical skills when it comes to self employment or when talking with clients.
I read a lot of books, and this is one that caused a change in my life. The succinct summary is that psychedelics are misunderstood and there is more and more research showing their potential, especially in the treatment of trauma.
I had a difficult childhood. It’s something I still struggle with personal interactions because of this, even after years of therapy. After reading Michael Pollen’s book I thought this might be something that could move the needle on my day-to-day quality of life.
I found a shaman and did an 8 hour blindfolded mushroom trip. Similar to what’s outlined in the book. Previously I’ve never done anything more than weed occasionally.
It had a profound impact on me. The way I describe it is like jumping off a diving board into a deep dark pool, and the pool is you. Then spending hours there.
I don’t know if I’d do it again but I learnt a lot about myself. I won’t proselytize here either, because the research is still early. There’s also risk because you put a lot of trust in someone who’s there with you while you’re high. But I do recommend at least reading the book.
We have to realize that medical doctors are not, as a rule, scientists. They typically get their doctoral degrees without personally ever doing any actual science, beyond pre-cooked experiments in lab classes. Instead, they have read a great deal about what other people who did science said. But what people say is not the same as what they do, and paying attention to what they say is not a substitute for doing what they did.
Instead, doctors are obliged to memorize a great deal of what they are told are facts. Probably most of what they are told really are facts. But there is nothing systematic distinguishing facts with a great deal of support from those that are just repeated lore, like the business about airborne disease transmission.
Doctors have rejected evidence for airborne transmission because it contradicts what they were taught are facts, with no warning about how shaky any asserted fact is.
Another source of resistance is that facts, to be believed, need a theory. A fact without a theoretical mechanism by which it must operate is rejected. We saw that for cholera before germ theory made sense of it.
For a current example, in doi:10.1093/gerona/glab115, it turns out that having had a recent TDAP vaccine (which you can ask for at any pharmacy) turns out to predict, very robustly, a 40% decrease in onset of dementia among patients at an age where they are at risk for it. A 40% effect size is enormous! At this point, nobody knows why. Is it the tetanus, the diphtheria, the pertussis antigens? Or something else mixed in? Nobody knows. But without a demonstrated mechanism, nobody can allow anyone to see them to take it seriously.
If money could buy taste, a lot of the world would look better than it does. Culture isn’t a function of dollars, and we’re very lucky to have many people at Stripe who just really, really want to do great work.
(There is proof that significant financial resources aren't needed to do great work in a lot of personal websites. Most recent example I came across: https://bruno-simon.com.)
0. https://twitter.com/LazarusLong13/status/1425517352624410627