Flightful

I’ve been to one of those places.

It was in Egypt, flying on the UH-1 Hueys they had there. The pilot said we were going to do something fun that day. After flying a long way out over the Sinai desert in the vast middle of absolutely nowhere, he set the chopper down. It was at least a hundred miles from any roads, any civilization, anything; we had not seen a camel or a house for 30 or 40 minutes. The area was bounded by mountains and there was no sign of any life.

As we stepped out of the cabin into the blistering heat the pilot said, “Congratulations, gentleman and lady1, you’re standing on ground it’s likely no human has ever stood on, and if so no one has been here for many thousands of years.”

Though it was hard, I am glad I joined the army and became a paratrooper. I got to see and do things that almost no one else ever gets the chance to experience.

  1. There was one woman with us.

Crawlers

Only people who didn’t know anything about anything thought that was true.

I personally — and I mean with my own funds — could build enough infrastructure to crawl 90%+ of the web every few days and store the metadata. It’s just not that much data. It’d take about $200,000 of gear and connectivity. That’d buy me a dozen petabytes of storage and a couple dozen 10Gb links. And that’s enough. The software is all open source.

Google’s moat has nothing to do with the ability to crawl or digest anything and more to do with their former search algo dominance.

Kashmir

This is not to take anything away from Sina. She’s great. An amazing drummer. But there’s never been a pure rock drummer like John Bonham. Perhaps Karen Carpenter. And…that’s about it.

That’s a great cover. And there’s nothing wrong with this, but she’s not Bonham. She’s a little too on top of the rhythm. Bonham dances with the rhythm, he plays with it and brings it where he needs it to be before you know it needs to go there. He’s behind the next note when that’s what makes sense and emphasizes or drags out a few phrases to make the music better. And, mostly, Sina doesn’t do any of that. Because what Bonham does can’t be imitated and probably cannot be taught.

Sina’s cover is technically perfect. But it’s also a bit shallow. It just doesn’t have the same soul.

Sina is better than almost any drummer who has ever lived. But when you’re playing against Bonham that simply does not matter.

Now compare Sina’s version with the original.

That hurried little fills in Kashmir are so great. How you learn to do something like that I cannot even begin to imagine.

Putin is stringing Trump along, and Trump doesnโ€™t seem to realize it.

Global Warming Has Accelerated.

Overall, just two of Americaโ€™s 50 largest metros offer median salaries that are high enough for those earning them to affordably buy a median-priced home: Detroit and Pittsburgh.

Why Does the U.S. Always Run a Trade Deficit?

BYD launches the new low-cost e7 EV in China, starting at under $15,000.

Fight or Donโ€™t Fight and Take the Consequences.

The New York Times vs AGI.