As for your point about A->B being a larger interval than B->C. There are two half-steps in the white keys (B->C and E->F) because there are two half steps in the major scale! This way, you can play C to C with all white keys and get a major scale.

A major scale is probably one of the most fundamental building blocks in western music theory and it's encoded right onto the keyboard layout itself.

The oddities of music theory are no more strange than all of the strange things in the English language that we just shrug about and move on once we learn it.

The comparison to _literal super heroes_ from comic books definitely made me roll my eyes

My problem with billionaires is that their gains are in part from exploitation. I just don't believe that one person can actually produce billions of dollars of value all by themselves. They extract that value from other people and our whole system is structured to promote this.

There are probably millions people who could have been Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates or Elon Musk or whoever. A million people with the right skills who maybe were born a few years too late or didn't have the right connections or just didn't have rich enough parents. It's a little too "winner take all" for my taste. And then those few winners end up having disproportionate affect on politics and issues that affect us all. It's just not a great system.

All I'm saying is that many technologies are a double-edged sword. They can have wonderful uses that make life better, but they can also make life worse in some ways. The Internet and cars are two perfect examples of that. And by the time we realize the harms of these technologies, it's too late.

So perhaps the challenge with any technology is figuring out how to reap the benefits without letting things get out of hand.

cars: people now live completely car-dependent lives and drive way too much. our infrastructure cannot handle people driving so much and it's extremely expensive and bad for our health and terrible for the environment

internet: well... obviously... social media and all the harms that come with that.

I think people who want to push a certain narrative might just set up a quick bot and tell that bot to start posting on Reddit or whatever and just let it run. Why not? Little effort on their part and they might actually have influence. The same reason why spammers apparently think sending me 10 text messages per day about a loan I've been approved for. It probably does work 0.0001% of the time, but that's okay if it's all automated.

The bar has been set so low that talking about it is seen as success now.

Sometimes I think the only way we'll really make meaningful progress is if we simply run out of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, we're just too good at getting them and too motivated to do so.

These days, it feels like tech is primarily interested in extracting value from us. I guess this is nothing new. Profits at any cost, and all that.

I don't know, I'm just kind of sad about all of it. Even though my smartphone is like 100x more powerful than my first computer, it still feels like something was lost

I bought a base layer years ago that basically fell apart after 1 month. It was like it was made of tissue paper. I bought a different one that has been AWESOME and has lasted 4 years so far with no signs of wear.

Starlink + reusable rockets... alright, not bad, but not exactly a "world changing bet". Seems far more hyped than anything. So he gets credit for just combining the idea of reusable rockets to send satellites into space? okay fine.

He had a lot of money and threw a lot at the wall to see what stuck. If I were a betting man, I'd bet against his "next big idea". He'll over-promise and under-deliver.

It's funny you mention that because I remember at the time of HyperLoop somebody said "what about just ... trains?" and we all scoffed at it as if trains were some outdated technology

Let's just say I'm on team trains now.

We would have been much better off with investment in tried-and-true boring old trains.

In hindsight, how could we all have fell for this? What a profoundly stupid idea, but I distinctly remember at the time it felt right.

I guess what I'm saying is that I think a lot of people just wised up and started seeing through his B.S.

I don't know what the answer is, but it feels wrong to lean _entirely_ on personal responsibility. We live in a world in which we were simply not evolved to live in. People literally make a good living by engineering and exploiting our weaknesses for profit.

> raise everyone with the forethought to know what might be addictive, the self-awareness to realize when you are addicted to something, and the self-control (and support systems if and when necessary) to stop

If only it were that easy. If you've ever known somebody who struggles with a serious addiction you'll know that even when they know it's destroying their life they still can't stop.