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> bubbles are notoriously unpredictable and generally don't happen when they are loudly and widely proclaimed to happen any minute now.

Is that true? It seemed to me that the most common opinion before the recent Chinese real estate crash was that it was a bubble; architect friends of mine who worked in China said the government had no doubt prices were unreasonably high; the thing they remained hopeful about is whether a soft landing was possible. Similarly it seems like it was by no means an uncommon opinion in the Japanese asset bubble, NFTs, beanie babies, and even the dotcom boom that this is (to use Greenspan’s phrase leading up to the dotcom bubble) “irrational exuberance”.


I also think its hard to know when it will pop. The Chinese real state bubble you are quoting is indeed a very good example. Everyone knew the prices were super high but no one really knew when it would blow. The state had a problem and they knew they had to stop it eventually. After/during the covid pandemic the state decided to start a slogan "houses are for living not for speculating" and they started to set redlines for leveraging and developing. If you know how financing works in china you know many of it flows through the state and related companies and financial structures. Then also when one of the biggest developers in the country blew up they left it to blow instead of buying it. They essentially popped it with policy.

So many would say the saw it coming but the truth is only people with inside info really knew when it would happen for sure.

Same happens today. Capital is being heavily allocated towards AI inference and infra because of the promised productivity. Nobody knows if its early or late and also nobody knows how will the state react to a possible bubble exploding. Some people would say maybe AI is too big to fall already and its better if we save it when it falls. Some people would say its better to let it blow up but again nobody knows what will truly happen until we get there.


Bubbles are extremely predictable. The problem is predicting when it will come crashing down.

Thomas Aquinas believed cruelty to animals was wrong not because animals have souls (and with that all the standard moral rights), but because it can teach us cruelty to other humans.

Snarky morning: "spiritual souls" as opposed to "mere animal souls". Sorry, could not control myself.

Spiritual or not, anyone watching cattle in an abatoir will recognize symptoms of the kind of foreboding that I would suffer prior to execution.

Yeah, I heard Jane Street disables even cache.nixos.org, and I think that's very sensible (but a pity...).


It’s still helpful to eg fold different phases in Nix, and different derivation output.

I work on garnix.io, which is exactly a Nix-based CI alternative for GitHub, and we had to build a lot of these small things to make the experience better.


We also do something similar at garnix, but when enabling incremental builds. Instead of just skipping the build stage, we also “normalize” the eval into just the store path, and skipping it the second time around.

Mentioned in passing in https://garnix.io/blog/incremental-builds. This is even more significant because in this case you might otherwise be eval-ing several layers of flakes.


Yeah, nix on macOS can be a pain…

You might be too deeply scarred to come close to it, but we just wrote a blog post about deploying NixOS servers without installing nix locally or provisioning work here that feels relevant: https://garnix.io/blog/hosting-nixos


if anyone is afraid of this happening to them, I'd recommend the deterministic nix installer. it has an atomic installation process where each step is reversible with the uninstaller. This is uniquely a macos issue since the setup is a bit different to other OS's in terms of creating a read only filesystem for the nix store, but the determinate installer was built to fix any worries of that happening.

https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer


can vouch for the detsys installer, and anecdotally, the resulting nix install seems more resilient across os updates. on a similar note, nix-darwin is a must-have. the typical nix-env stuff you see in introductions to nix on non-nixos systems really sells it short, as it feels like just another package manager to keep track of. by contrast, nix-darwin brings the centralised configuration.nix approach, which makes it way harder to hose your environment.

https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin


This is part of why we built https://garnix.io/


Garn [0] is most of that: simpler CLI, and Typescript for configuration, though lying on top of Nix.

(Disclaimer: I work on garn)

[0] https://github.com/garnix-io/garn


I looked at the docs, and it seems promising but I’d like to do something like: `garn add --dev git@2.3` and have git added at the given version as a dev tool. With config-as-code, is it possible?


It’s to allow interpolation of packages and environments. But in practice we don’t use it that often, so we were thinking of switching the main function to using just a second string argument. (In other words, I agree.)


That seems reasonable! I can’t really locate any examples of that functionality. Could you show me what that would look like?


One working example is this:

  import * as garn from "https://garn.io/ts/v0.0.14/mod.ts";
  import * as pkgs from "https://garn.io/ts/v0.0.14/nixpkgs.ts";

  export const main: garn.Executable = garn.shell`${pkgs.jq}/bin/jq --version`;
Put that in a 'garn.ts' file and run 'garn run main' and you should see the version of 'jq' that you can get from our 'nixpkgs' module.

But yeah, I completely agree with the sentiment here. This is a rather cumbersome syntax to support a use-case that we don't even have examples for. So clearly the normal usage shouldn't force you to use template strings.


I can definitely the utility of it.

Perhaps a standalone function (like nixRaw) could work to enable this.


This is coming from David Sinclair, who claimed resveratrol was the fountain of youth (it wasn't, but he still managed to sell his resveratrol company for hundreds of millions), and pushed rather hard also on NAD/NMN despite only very preliminary and limited results (he also has interests in NMN companies, and has been involved in removing it from the supplement market in favor of that company's right to market it as a drug). More likely than a cure for aging, Sinclair just found another cure for too few cars in his garage.

https://khn.org/news/a-fountain-of-youth-pill-sure-if-youre-...

https://www.nutraingredients-usa.com/Article/2022/11/15/FDA-...


He also says this in the article:

“ This is the first study showing that we can have precise control of the biological age of a complex animal; that we can drive it forwards and backwards at will”

And the paper doesn’t show that at all. The paper does not show them reversing the aging of anything.


I couldn't get access to the paper, but the abstract and the article both claimed they were able to reverse organ damage caused by the aging. Is that not backed up in the paper?


Idk why selling something you believe in disqualifies you as a scientist.

He’s also helped pioneer and make credible the entire field of aging research to reform people’s idea of how to look at aging.

Don’t be so cynical dude.


It's generally still not considered a credible field. Mostly hucksters and grifters.


He is a professor at Harvard - I imagine he wouldn't get to that role if the science didn't have some merit.

Where did he ever say that resveratol was the fountain of youth? Interviews I've seen with him seem more reasonable then I always hear people make him out to be.

NMN does have some promising results based on recent studies- what do you mean he pushed hard? Where did he actually do that?


Resveratrol is "as close to a miraculous molecule as you can find."

NAD+ “is the closest we’ve gotten to a fountain of youth.”

Both quoted in an excellent article on Sinclair:

https://www.bostonmagazine.com/health/2019/10/29/david-sincl...


>> He is a professor at Harvard - I imagine he wouldn't get to that role if the science didn't have some merit.

You should see what Huberman often shills and he's a prestigious professor as well.

Would also add that until recently - and by his own hand - Jordan Peterson was a professor at first Harvard, then the University of Toronto.


Andrew Huberman does take and talk about certain medications and supplements which haven't yet been proven effective. However, he has always been completely clear about what the science does and does not say so that people can make up their own minds. He has also consistently been open and ethical about conflicts of interest.

https://hubermanlab.com/developing-a-rational-approach-to-su...


what exactly does Huberman shill? As far as I can tell, he has done an extemely commendable service bringing academic literature to the masses.


Don't know about Huberman but how did JP "shill" anything? Can you give a few examples of deceptive statements by him?


> Can you give a few examples of deceptive statements by him?

Joking, are we?


Spill the tea girlfriend, I'm sure you are right but we don't all follow or have even heard of him, why be coy.


He shills diet, sleep and exercise, and maybe circadian stuff. What are you referencing here? The ad sponsors?


Who in the anti-aging space do HN users consider credible?


Without any doubt—The NIA Interventions Testing Program. They have 20 years of experience on effects of dietary interventions supporting longer lifespan.

https://www.nia.nih.gov/research/dab/interventions-testing-p...


Does anybody write articles on the stuff that is released from this org that lay people can understand?


There is Reason who runs a successful biotech company, and his corpus of writing at https://fightaging.org

His commentary on new papers in ageing is pretty good, in my opinion.

He has a good coverage of NIA ITP trials as well: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Afightaging.org+NIA&ia=web


Dr. Kaeberlein and Dr. Attia.


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