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For most taxes you expect higher earners to pay more but this is not the case with student loans because high earners pay of their loans quickly whereas lower earners end up paying far more in interest.

An actual graduate tax would be far less regressive than the current system


Could also have a minimum duration (for example 3 years) where you pay even if you go over the original loan amount.

That would mean people that get great paying jobs right out of college would pay more than they even borrowed, but it would be justified because the degree would likely have had a big impact if it was so soon after finishing the degree.


> so either none of the current competitors are doping or all of them are

The drafting effect in cycling means that a clean cyclist can finish very closely behind a doped cyclist


That only works on the flat stages. A small difference in power to weight ratio makes a huge difference in finishing times on the mountain stages where drafting is less of a factor.


Don't forget the GC rules for assigning times.

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_classification:

    Riders who finish in the same group are awarded the same time, with possible subtractions due to time bonuses. Two riders are said to have finished in the same group if the gap between them is less than three seconds. A crash or mechanical incident in the final 3 kilometres of a stage that finishes without a categorised climb usually means that riders thus affected are considered to have finished as part of the group they were with at the 3 km mark, so long as they finish the stage.
For this year's 5th stage of the Tour de France, the first 155 riders were assigned the same time.

see https://www.procyclingstats.com/race/tour-de-france/2024/sta...


And then there’s Pidcock who has the reflexes of a fighter pilot and can scream down the hills at speeds that would make you blanch.


I'm not sure their reflexes are better. It's more like they're the master of the feel and minutia of the airplane. They're also masters of managing the energy of their airplane, constantly trading off between altitude and speed. John Boyd was a fantastic example of that. There's a fascinating biography of him, "Boyd".

https://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/031...


Do you suppose there are stats on number and success of breakaways out there? Could be my imagination but this year seems less dramatic than the ten years or so around Armstrong’s rein.

Did anyone else feel like there was more drama around the end of the Indurain era?

I feel like doping could show up as more intense struggles for first without necessarily increasing the spread of placing. Also people who drop out don’t count right?


https://pypi.org/project/formulas/ might help with this without needing the OpenAI part


Thanks for the link! We looked into existing libraries for Excel formula execution - this library as an awesome example!

We considered using this, but to copy from our MVP spec:

The easiest thing to do is to replicate Excel’s execution engine — you can see someone who has done this [here](https://pypi.org/project/xlcalculator/). But this is just evaluating Excel formulas is not what users want when transitioning a process to Excel - they want to be able to ditch Excel (mostly).

The next easiest thing would be to transpile Excel formulas to the following format:

    # This is not a useful or usable artifact; you're still trapped in Excel
    # but things are just worse now, since it's not on a 2d grid
    A1 = "Prices"
    A2 = 1
    A3 = 2
    B1 = "With Tax"
    B2 = SUM(A1, 10) * 1.3
    B3 = SUM(A2, 10) * 1.3
But this is ultimately is an awful solution for the user:

1. It’s 100% impossible to read. A large Excel file often has 100k+ formulas (many of them with shared structures). This is 100k+ lines of code...

2. It’s impossible to maintain. Yeah, since it lacks all semantic structure, there’s no f** way you’re going to test it or modify it.

In general: *we're trying to generate a Python script that appears to be written by an expert developer. To do this, you have to be willing to ditch the Excel formulas / execution engine.


> It seems like ClosedAI wants their system to follow the desires of some people and not others, but without describing which ones or why

If the problem is "unaligned AI will destroy humanity" then I'd take a system aligned with the desires of some people but not others over the unaligned alternative


> What might be seen as exponential progress could actually be the accumulation of a few tremendous leaps

This is what exponential progress is as long as the leaps continue happening


While I agree with your point, I think it ultimately depends on the timescale we're looking at. In other words, if we're looking at a timescale of several years, it's conceivable that we've been experiencing such leaps several times over the previous rate (or more?) for about the past decade. However, if we're looking at a matter of a few weeks, it may seem like we're stagnating. The point is that we cannot predict if these leaps will continue to occur, and when they will happen.


One construction of the natural numbers that I've seen is

1. There exists an element 0 that is a natural number

2. For every natural number there is a "sucessor" that is also a natural number. (i.e. if n is a natural number then n+1 is a natural number)

This construction means there can't be an upper bound N because then step 2 couldn't be applied to N.

Maybe there are other constructions that could workaround this? I'm guessing not because you'd still struggle to define the usual rules of addition for all numbers in a bounded set


> This construction means there can't be an upper bound N because then step 2 couldn't be applied to N.

Bendegem discusses this problem at length in his paper [1]. As programming-heavy site, I assume we're all aware that computers have finite resources. The universe too has finite resources so no matter how big a computer you build, it too will be finite. Therefore the infinity that is so pervasive in math is unphysical in a very real sense. So what would math look like and how would theorems change if this finiteness were formalized? That's what various flavours of finitism aim to achieve.

So to get back to your question as to the nature of the naturals, it seems evident that yes, at some point, you literally can fail construct the natural number N+1 if you are given N, because you will run out of particles in the universe. What implications this will have for various theorems will be interesting for sure, but it isn't clear yet because finitism isn't given much funding.

Edit: however, it's clear that some very unintuitive results follow from the infinities embedded in mathematics, and that a finitist approach resolves some of them. For instance, the argument that "0.9999... = 1" is true in classical mathematics while this equality is arguably not true under strict finitism because "0.999..." does not exist, because infinite objects do not exist, and so it will never equal 1.

[1] See the section on continuous counting, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288354797_A_Defense...


Calling “0.999… = 1” very unintuitive is a very strange thing to say, because that makes perfect sense to most children. I’d like to see a result that truly is unintuitive, like what we get with the axiom of choice.


> Calling “0.999… = 1” very unintuitive is a very strange thing to say, because that makes perfect sense to most children.

Gotta call bullshit on that. First I don't think you have any robust empirical data on that question.

Second what's convincing to children that don't have enough knowledge of math to have formed any intuitions about it is not a compelling argument.


I remember being a kid and having this discussion in elementary school. Kids have enough intuition to know that operations with fractions should get the same result as with decimal numbers. Or that 1-0.999… = 0.000…. Or that different lengths have a length in between them. All are legitimate and compelling arguments.


I think lots of students get lost with different orders of infinity (countable, uncountable, etc.), so I think there is definitely a point beyond which you can't push the intuition behind infinite objects.


> Or that different lengths have a length in between them. All are legitimate and compelling arguments.

Except that's wrong, not all lengths do have a length between them.


Thank you for the link to the paper; very interesting!


I think that at a networking event 1-2 minute conversations are normal so this isn't a sign you are doing something wrong


Don't you just end up on a "meaning treadmill" instead?


IME, meaning is far more satiating than happiness simply because it is able to offset more BS than being happy will.

More to your question: what happens is your tolerance for meaninglessness decreases, which has good and bad side effects.


> your tolerance for meaninglessness decreases

I think part of what keeps me locked on to the hedonistic treadmill is that a lot of other people (including my partner) don't like who I am when I'm trying to stay off it. I tend to get more intense about a lot of things most folks don't care about.

It's funny, out of my whole family & friend circle I'm probably doing the most damage to myself via self medication, but when I try to get serious about things that matter and take a break from intoxicants, I end up doing just as much damage or more by putting my relationships through pointless trials of fire.

But I know what you mean about meaning. When it's good, it's really good and worth every bit of seeking.

It's unfortunate there are so many pitfalls to dodge for so many of us.


Yeah, I feel this, and, it hurts. A lot.

Others in your life may say they support your emphasis on spiritual growth, but what if that entails being passed up for a promotion, and, ergo, a raise? Most families would appreciate an extra $1k a month. Not every situation is either-or, but you quickly get a sense for what pragmatism means to people.

Often, it means comfort.

I hope you find the courage to continue to pursue meaning. It is good, as you say. Me, I made a bit of a deal with myself to make it a very high priority in my life when it is lacking. When necessary, meaning goes into the non-negotiable bucket.


> There’s a huge difference between being there from day one vs day 2,555. Between being a founder and an employee who joined later on

This is true but there is also a huge difference between 97% and 3%


36000 Mexicans is 0.03%

For more context https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... has the risk of death by traffic in Mexico as 0.01%


You're kidding right? For one thing, these statistical odds do nothing to change the tragedy of death or disappearance for the families of any of those people. Secondly, the numbers don't include unreported murders and disappearances.

Even if you still try to minimize these factors with dry presentation of statistical odds with these additional causes of death/disappearance included, remember that certain activities dramatically increase the odds of being a victim. These activities are far from strange things. They include things like frequent travel, driving or travelling alone, especially at night, walking certain areas at certain times and so forth. The dangers are very real and affect people's behavior in many unfortunate ways that don't easily show up in a trite statistical summary.

I'm not trying to be dramatic. over 120 million people in the country live their lives every day and millions of them still do lots of interesting recreational things, but there is a shadow across much of what in other places would be much safer.


Just saying "36000 die" by itself doesn't tell me very much about how dangerous it is - expressing that as a percentage gives much more information I think.

As another person points out 0.03% is 3 times the risk of dying in traffic which, before looking at the numbers, I would have guessed to be the most dangerous aspect of a trip like this.

You seem to think I am being trite and using a "dry presentation" of statistics to minimise the risks of being murdered by a cartel but I actually find this presentation brings the (large) risk of it home to me much more clearly than with a contextless number like 36,000.

E.g. for the UK the numbers are 0.001% murders and 0.003% for traffic


3 times the risk of death by traffic? This is the scariest thing I've ever read in my life; it is a staggering level of violence.


Now do the numbers per 100,000 population


As of 2018 (and it's gotten a notable bit worse since then if we look at absolute numbers per year), it stood at 29 per 100,000. This is four times higher than the U.S homicide rate by the way, and the U.S homicide rate is itself considered high by the standards of other developed nations.

In the other hand to be fair, Mexico isn't in the top ten of most violent countries by murder rate. Most of those top ten aren't war zones either, while Mexico technically is.


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