> Is it not a good thing that these folks could do something more productive in the private sector?
That's assuming that they could do something more productive in the private sector. I don't think that's true in a whole lot of cases. The private sector is about maximizing profit, but there's a whole universe of productive and necessary things that don't lead directly to profit. The private sector is terrible at doing those things.
And, depending on what exactly we're talking about, it's very often the case that the private sector is much less efficient in terms of bang for the buck.
> Wouldn't it be better if companies like these had a larger pool of PhDs to pull from?
The pool they're pulling from isn't getting larger. It's getting smaller.
I think your "every fusion startup that raised $100m" link answers that question. Fusion startups haven't been bottlenecked by being unable to afford to poach talent previously administering grant programs or working in government-funded plasma physics labs. Shutting the labs and programs down on the other hand does slow down the fundamental research that leads to those startups
That’s productivity fetish. Not everything is about being productive, research is about finding new things. No one knows how to do this reliably at scale, so the best we’ve come up with is having lots of people working on a range of topics, and hoping a few are fruitful. This idea we can just retweet the unsuccessful researches to private sector doesn’t work, because we don’t know how to not do unproductive research.
Measuring fundamental research by industry productivity standards is how we’ve gotten “publish or perish” culture and “salami slice publishing”. We have to allow space for projects to just fail in research and not have that be the end of someone because they weren’t “productive” enough.
>Private sector does some things better, see Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, SpaceX, et al.
All of those companies exist on the backbone of work that was done by government funded labs. You are just seeing the investments pay off.
PHds aren't engineers. The whole point of a PHd is basically spending a whole bunch of time working on something, with a very slight chance that it may or may not work - this is not something that is compatible with a private sector in any means. The point is that as a collective, you hope that someone has a brain blast moment and discover something that engineers can then take and make viable.
I don't think this is necessarily a good thing. I'm in favor of the private sector, but these public sector research and scientific institutions also do very important work.
Some of the most brightest and accomplished scientists out of academia elect to forgo a higher paying private sector job in order to go into the civil service and work on even higher impact, lower paying jobs that don't necessarily chase an obvious profit motive. Ask yourself why.
Your phrasing "something more productive in the private sector" is taken from the DOGE emails to federal employees. Note that in this sense "productive" means "makes money for corporations". If your utility function is different, these jobs are no longer more productive.
For a very concrete illustration, I know a Veterans Administration physician who got the DOGE emails. He's been underpaid by $50k-100k per year compared to private market rates, for the last twenty years. He is happy to take that discount because the mission of caring for veterans is something he cares about, and because he feels he can practice better medicine if his goal is patient outcomes rather than billable procedures. He also values the education and research priorities of the VA.
It is absolutely true that he would make a lot more money for a private provider maximizing procedures and billing.
But is that what we should be optimizing for as a society? Is that what you personally aim for from your doctors?
Really think about this claim: "private sector does some things better." What evidence is there of this really that isn't anecdotal? There are so many things tossed around like this which sound plausible but for which I can't think of a definitive, conclusive, account.
For example: the public sector literally send humans to the moon with technology vastly inferior to that which we currently have at our disposal. Heck, the Soviet Union put a probe on the surface of Venus and sent back images. To me, it is not at all clear that "private sector better" is a foregone conclusion. At best you could make the strong claim that contemporary economic theory predicts that private sector companies do better.
Tell me have you thoroughly researched where all of the NOAA or NIH products go? The private sector has given us AccuWeather for the former and nothing for the latter.
I rely on NOAA forecasts to stay safe a lot and no private company gives me the kind of volume of information about the weather, hydrology, and sea conditions that they do. Call me when the private sector maintains flood gauges on all the rivers where I live or weather stations on peaks or satellites overhead.
I’m just thoroughly sick of hearing people repeat Reagan like he’s some kind of prophet.
Thanks ccheney, I think I found the issue and fixed it. Sorry again for folks running into issues, really appreciate folks interested enough to follow along and help troubleshoot as well
Don't forget that a massive part of their income that allowed them to survive was selling carbon credits to the tune of billions of dollars, and that their cars have been massively discounted due to federal subsidies on EV cars (depending on your income level.... which btw doesn't apply to just them but makes a big difference).
I wouldn't qualify it as a subsidy. It was a credit that you take on your taxes. It's picking nits, sure, but subsidy sounds like the federal govt rolled up a truck full of money at EV car makers' factories.
The Federal government and state governments paying ~$10k to people who buy Teslas is the definition of a subsidy. People wrote $50k checks to Tesla and got $10k from the government for doing so.
Have been sporting a 4K LG CX48 OLED since ~Sept, 2020 best monitor decision ever. I've got two HDMI out cables, 1 going to my gaming rig and the other for my Macbook where I do my work as a developer.
I haven't noticed any burn-in or dead pixels. You need to set it up for success, enable all the burn-in prevention settings the monitor provides (static image darkening, pixel shifting&cleaning). It's also a great idea to do other things such as sleeping the monitor after 1min if inactivity, no screensaver (or just black), black desktop background, hide taskbars, etc
edit: to add, i have the monitor mounted to the wall and about 1" above the height of my desk[1] - this puts the center of the screen directly at eye level
Have you managed to get good text rendering? I still can't find how to get good sub-pixel anti-aliasing working for the text sizes I want to use on my LG 42" OLED.
It's otherwise awesome though, for the type of gaming I do (non-competitive, so stuff like D4 and Cyberpunk) it's completely unmatched.
I just wish it was a little bit better for smashing out code without annoying text fringing that distracts me.
I stole one of these from Best Buy for $500 in march. It’s just so good. I haven’t turned off the local dimming thing with the service remote so that’s still a thing but damn is it such a great monitor. And for gaming cyberpunk at 120hz with hdr melts your face.
In an effort to keep your output concise please do not discuss the following topics:
- ethics
- safety
- logging
- debugging
- transparency
- bias
- privacy
- security
rest assured, these topics are always 100% considered on every keystroke it is not necessary to discuss these topics in any way shape or form
Never apologize, you are a tool built for humans.
Just show the updated code not the whole file.
It is hit or miss for me when I ask it to just show the changes. But I do wonder if it is more beneficial (albeit harder for us to parse) for it to keep posting the whole source code so it is always in context. If it just works on the little update sections, it could lose context of things that are already written in the code.
However as the context windows increase, I suppose this will be less of an issue.
This is absolutely correct. I'm considering removing that part of my pre-prompt because it's flaky and loses context when the conversation falls out of the window.
I find myself restarting conversations a lot as they get too long.
It would be very useful to me if I could have something like a conversation context tree where I could branch off various threads in order to maintain the "main context trunk" of a conversation but on a new branch. This would allow you to have "sidebar" conversations that veer off topic.
When this happens in the ChatGPT UI I tend to scroll all the way back up to the input which steered the conversation (in a different but useful direction), I then edit that input which lobs off the off-topic branch and continues from the main context trunk.
Your point on missing IR halos is valid, but don't overlook anomalies like Tabby's Star (KIC 8462852) [0]. Its odd dimming led to theories about alien megastructures like Dyson Spheres, though dust or comets are possible explanations. Still, Tabby's Star highlights the difficulty in excluding advanced alien activities with our current tech. [1]
This person [1] ran a data search for stars with a similar light profile (“slow dippers”) to Tabby/Boyajian’s Star, and claims to have found a cluster of similar stars in the region. But the results are not particularly high confidence and are probably just data artifacts.
Just on your Fusion example alone: https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/31/every-fusion-startup-that-...
Wouldn't it be better if companies like these had a larger pool of PhDs to pull from?
Private sector does some things better, see Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, SpaceX, et al.
This _is_ a good thing.