Big Island is an extremely interesting place. Its just few kilometers wide but it has around 8 climate zones ranging from snow, desert, volcano, tropical, beaches, rainforest what not. You can drive less than an hour and go from desert to snow and snow to tropical.
There is one public bus that goes around and once I was the only passenger and the driver stopped the bus near the ocean to show the travelling whales/dolphins.
You must be thinking of a different island. Hawaii, the Big Island is big. 93 miles long, 76 miles wide. Maui has a narrow waist (an isthmus connecting two volcanos), 6 miles across.
This description still applies to Big Island (if we stretch it a bit):
> You can drive less than an hour and go from desert to snow and snow to tropical.
You can drive from the beach on the leeward side, going past dry ranchland with an average annual rainfall of ~10-15" (similar to arid West Texas places like Midland), to the Mauna Kea Observatory, where snow can sometimes be found, in under an hour and a half; and from there across to the windward side, back to the beach at Hilo, with about 10 feet of rain a year, in another hour and 15 minutes or so.
We did a tour to Mauna Kea and watched the sunset from above the cloud layer. It was spectacular.
And as you say, snow, whereas we'd been on the beach just a couple of hours before. Guide didn't drive straight up due to acclimatization and I still got slightly dizzy up there, it's over 4200m (13800 ft) up there after all.
While the Big Island is certainly much larger than the other Hawaiian islands, it's not huge. We did day trips covering about a third of the island, including multiple tourist-y stops. And yea the nature there kept surprising us again and again.
Everything is silly, and consensus reality on these kind of things is just a glorified Reddit thread IRL. There's at least four plausible metrics. Everest is tallest from the local mean sea level (the smoothed gravitational equipotential—what a stationary water surface hugs); McKinley-Denali from its local terrain base; Mauna Kea from the local terrain base inclusive of underwater terrain; and Chimborazo, in equatorial Ecuador (it's Ecuador because it's equatorial), as measured from this planet's center-of-mass (the planet bulges out approaching the equator because of its spinning—"oblateness").
Like a Reddit thread, it's best not to argue too much with what the hive-mind decides. People literally died climbing what they believed to be the correct answer. Let them have their thing. :)
Following up on your pedantism: Chimborazo isn't in Ecuador because it's equatorial, but rather, it's equatorial because it's in Ecuador.
(Or, perhaps, because it lies near or on the equator.)
There are non-Ecuadorian equatorial locations.
:-)
(I do like, appreciate, and was previously aware of the various claims to "highest mountain". Interesting also to contemplate that the early Rockies, and perhaps Appalachian mountains (themselves older than dirt, literally), may once have exceeded thirty thousand feet (approaching 10,000 m). Though the Rockies figure might be an ambitious reading of the Teton Fault having experienced 20,000 -- 30,000 feet of vertical displacement. This is possible without peaks reaching such heights, given erosion. Estimates of the original height of the Appalachians is even more tenuous and indirect.)
Enjoyed your clear description but I don't know that framing it as some kind of hive mind group think issue is that accurate. It's just taxonomy and ontology, it's ok to have different taxonomies for different contexts. The same issue exists for everything. planets, temperature, oceans, species..
What is being called hive mind, that used to be called cargo cult, is a real thing on HN, though.
There’s this fantasy that there are a bunch of geniuses that can adequately cover any topic here and that discussion will be inclusive and enlightening, but, no, it’s just a frustrating cauldron of wannabes and bad info that periodically hit upon things.
Hive mind, cargo cult, and a third phenomena, groupthink, are somewhat related but probably more usefully considered as distinct.
A hive mind in its original form is a form of emergent intelligence most especially associated with social insects (e.g., ants, bees, and termites), where collective behavioural patterns emerge which are independent of, and not fully explained by, any individual behaviours or intelligence. The term is of course also applied to humans, perhaps most famously as "the madness of crowds", as popularised by the book of the same title.
Groupthink, to skip over cargo cults for a moment, is a case where individual beliefs and/or behaviours are influenced by a group, often as an otherwise poorly-substantiated set of beliefs or actions, usually in agreement with some leader. Why groupthink emerges and what possible social/psychological evolutionary advantages it might convey (compensating for the cost of beliefs at odds with reality and empirical evidence) are hotly debated. Unlike the hive mind, groupthink isn't emergent, in the sense that individuals express specific beliefs or exhibit specific behaviours, though generally associated with the group context.
Cargo-cults are a form of groupthink. My own view is that cargo cults emerge in response to highly complex phenomena, either entirely beyond the grasp of individuals, or pushing the limits of scientific or technical knowledge. The original form, emerging on Pacific islands during and following WWII were a case of a non-technological culture (the native island inhabitants) trying to attain the benefits of a technological society (the various military belligerants of WWII) by emulating airstrips and the hope of the cargo (goods and services) these apparently brought the advanced society. Air-borne transport is knowable by humans, but only in a given social-technological context, which the islanders lacked.
In other instances, cargo culting tends to resemble fads and fashions where indicia or characteristics of some complex concept are adhered to, sometimes to achieve their ends, sometimes to indicate adherence to or alignment with a group. Fashion, language, dress, management trends, and software development practices (3GL, structured code, Agile, ML, and the like may all be examples in at least some cases). Often the foundations are more than purely technical, e.g., management or investors may feel a need to follow the crowd / leaders, often to avoid scapegoating or accountability in the event of failure.
All of which of course is distinct from the false-competence delusion of an expert within one domain presuming expertise in others, e.g., Nobel Disease <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease>.
Shout out to Chimborazo, where the summit is (likely) furthest from the center of the Earth. (I understand Huascarán is in contention, and don't know the latest details.)
It feels like it makes a bit more sense with Mauna Kea, since Big Island is just five shield volcanoes in a trenchcoat, and the point where the land meets the ocean is basically just the foothills of the mountains. You cannot say that of Everest, which is over 400 miles from the nearest ocean.
The predominant wind is from the east, and the air cools aid forms rainclouds as it tries to rise over the mountains in the center of the island. Then warms again as it descends down the eastern slopes.
So the eastern (Hilo) side is pretty lush jungle, and the west(Kona) is desert.
With snowy mountains in between.
It's interesting to see the transition. Lush green grass and vegetation on your left, and as you turn your head right, it goes more yellow and then completely dry desert on your right.
It's almost like you can see the line across the terrain.
You can follow some indie people on twitter. meetup is almost dead so best bet is to get into this indie groups and then network out or even go to coworking group events
I attend some networking events, but often broad ones cause I think I’m not in the know enfough to attend niche ones. Only way to learn high is to attend.
The sanctions on Russia has triggered a flight of capital and gold across countries. I am just surprised why US is buying so much gold given that its mostly developing countries to buffer up their own reserves so that they can trade in their own currencies.
US has USD so why is it stocking up on Gold. Someone somewhere knows the answers.
Definitely not “in almost all” cases are people physically shifting gold. Thousands of transactions in gold are done every day. The bulk of those will be Futures with no physical delivery. There are very few commod trades with physical delivery except for industrial uses so this is highly unusual.
Now when you’re talking about strategic trades by central banks, many of those will be for geopolitical reasons. eg Argentina might be worried that in the event of a sovereign default (which goodness knows Argentina have done plenty of times) bondholders may sieze assets, so might want to move the gold to a friendly jurisdiction where the legal system will make this harder for people. Remember that if you’re just moving depositary reciepts (the paperwork GP is talking about) you need someone who owns gold in your target location to swap with. So say you have gold in NYC and you want gold in London, it’s going to be very easy for you to find someone with gold physically in London to swap with or you can just sell your NYC gold and buy some LDN gold. But it’s going to be much much harder to buy gold somewhere where there isn’t a commod forward delivery location (eg Buenos Aires) so it’s much more likely you would have to move gold in that case.
When financial firms take physical delivery [1] it’s usually as an arbitrage because of what the forward curve looks like in that particular commodity, making it viable to do the so called “cash and carry” arb where you buy the physical, sell short the future, take physical delivery, hold it for a while and then deliver. It’s rare and a bit of a surprise tactic and when people do this the difference after carry costs is not usually very large in percentage terms so people do it in big size to make it worthwhile.
And yes it is a bunch of trucks carrying physical gold probably to a vault in the basement of JPM that even most folks at JPM don’t know exists. They won’t be shutting off roads as they don’t want to draw attention before the delivery is complete.
[1] And I used to be a strategist in fixed income, currencies and commodities so I do know people who planned these trades in the past.
its all delivered in secret flights and routes. Last year, an insider in Canadian airport got tipped off about impending arrival of gold and got along with his friends for the "largest heist in canadian history" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Pearson_International_...
It doesn't work like this. The stock might fall around $10-$20 every month in the worst case scenario. In which case the premium of $180 will keep rising every week, 90% of which will expire worthless.
You have to buy really farther out or really far off strike both of which have nearly zero probability ( delta is nearly zero and less than 1)
>Much of South India and Eastern India was already British ruled by the early 1800s.
No they were not. They were run by private East India Company. With the revolt of 1857 and quashing of the rebellion, the official Raj by the British Royals began
You are still bickering over pedantic stuff. Britain profited from slave trade. They just didn't want to use the term "slave" and used "colony" instead.
Actually the rate of hallucination is not constant across the board. For one you're doing a sort of synthesis, not intense reasoning or retrieval with the llm. Second, the problem is segmented into sub problems much like how gpt-o1 or o3 does using CoT. Thus, the risk of hallucinations is significantly lower compared to a zero-shot raw LLM or even a naive RAG approach.
It's one of the reason Russia was very hesitant to shoot them down initially. Some of the planes were cessna and similar single engine prop planes that were loaded with explosives and remote controller:
There is one public bus that goes around and once I was the only passenger and the driver stopped the bus near the ocean to show the travelling whales/dolphins.