roystgnr
3d ago
Yet rather than the answer to "It's no big deal" being "fine, then let me win" instead
In case anyone else is put off by the volume of other links, I want to point out that this was a particularly amusing little rabbit hole to go down, despite my disinterest in most of the NixOS drama.
[Demand for codifying mandatory apologies to anyone who makes a claim of having been hurt]
[Pointing out that the validity of each claim might be an important detail]
[Doubling down, insisting that "if your mindset is already in that kind of detail" you're probably not "productive"]
[Pointing out that this kind of insult is hurtful and should deserve an apology]
[crickets chirping]
They might as well save some bytes and replace the CoC with "Who, whom?". That would also give them more time to focus on software, if somehow they retain any of the detail-oriented people you need to write decent software.
roystgnr
6d ago
When the causal graph has more than two nodes, something can have a negative correlation (when measured with no controls) despite having a positive causative effect (which would show a positive correlation in an RCT), or vice versa. People who get chemotherapy are way more likely to die of cancer than people who don't.
I can't imagine the education/fertility relationship being an example of that, though. Nerds go to college more and have fewer kids, but not as many fewer as they'd have had without going to college? Sounds like a stretch.
roystgnr
8d ago
We've already synthesized "real" meat that may not be as good as real meat. Grain-fed beef can have an omega-3:omega-6 ratio several times worse than traditional grass-fed grass-finished beef, but everyone eats grain-fed since it's half the price. Time to fix the problem with a ban?
roystgnr
9d ago
If men are bad alone why would they be good together?
Because of the binomial distribution? If 1/6 men are secretly pure evil, so each individual man is Russian roulette, then a clump of just 5 random men gets the odds of evil ones outnumbering good down to 1/28, and a society of as few as 99 men gets us down to about 1 in 100 trillion.
Or just because of the multiplication rule in probability? If 1/6 men are secretly mostly evil (they'll commit a rape in a he-said she-said scenario but they won't kill unfavorable witnesses) then even a clump of 5 random men has the odds of unanimously-evil down to 1/7776.
And if individual men aren't quite as risky as Russian roulette, the risks get pushed down even faster in groups. A rate of 1% for individuals (now each individual man is a mere climb to the summit of Everest) now becomes 1/100,000 or 1/10,000,000,000 in a group of 5.
roystgnr
11d ago
Were there protests against Israel in 1973-74?
Oh yeah. The backstory had a similar "fuck around and find out" pattern, right down to a sneak attack on the same Jewish holiday, though a priori you'd have thought the Egypt / Syria / Saudi / Algerian / Jordanian / Iraqi / Libyan / Kuwaiti / Tunisian / Moroccan (plus a handful of Cuban troops and North Korean pilots!) coalition had a much better chance than Hamas did of accomplishing something more than just psychological warfare. The protest actions afterward were also much more directly impactful.
roystgnr
15d ago
If the rough estimates Wikipedia collected are reasonable then you're a surprisingly good guesser.
roystgnr
18d ago
There is simply no way that most people would prefer years of incarceration to caning or similar physical punishments.
I think more important than whether we've properly calibrated the amount of punishment is whether we've optimized the effects of punishment.
Why do we punish people? For incapacitation, for denunciation, for retribution, for a deterrent, for reparation, for rehabilitation, and for expiation. The further you go down that list in that order, the worse prison looks.
Incapacitation is probably what prison is best at, better than any punishment short of the death penalty (and a lot more flexible than that...). Every year you keep an offender away from potential victims is a year likely to have fewer actual victims. I suspect no amount of caning or stockades or whatever else we might bring back would be enough to completely eliminate the need for prison as a "backup" for repeat offenders.
You'd think calibrating any sort of punishment would make it reasonably effective for denunciation and retribution, right? We have The System tell the offender that they did a horrible thing, it prescribes a certain level of suffering for the offender, and this gives us a shared ethical code and some feeling it's being enforced (at least if the police and the prosecutors are doing their jobs, but that's a requirement with any form of punishment). Thinking about incarceration from this perspective, already it's possible to see cracks in the system. Is it even possible to calibrate the suffering we prescribe to different offenders? If you're accosted by some thug and have to fight back before the police arrive, do you think his prison sentence would deliver as much suffering as yours would, if a jury doesn't think your self-defense was justified or proportional and convicts you in addition to or instead of him? If you're very upper class you may have the social/financial/cultural capital to recover (respect, Martha Stewart!), or if you're very lower class you may be okay with a little free room and board, but if you're middle class your career may never recover. Other forms of punishment have similar flaws here, though, so it's hard to fault incarceration specifically.
As a deterrent, incarceration is probably specifically much less effective than the same level of suffering would be if delivered as corporal punishment. The sort of high-time-preference offender who thinks crime is a good idea in the first place is not going to be nearly as deterred by suffering which is scheduled years into the future, and because the suffering from prison is so more gradual than the suffering from corporal punishment there's no way to avoid letting it stretch long into the future for serious crimes.
For reparation (aside from "the victim feels better to see the offender suffer"; I'm counting that with retribution), incarceration is basically useless (it doesn't transfer any value to the victims) or worse (it conflicts with possibilities like wage garnishment that could transfer some value to victims).
For rehabilitation, in theory prison could be helpful, but in practice it seems to be worse than useless. Criminals are not being isolated from the bad influences that led them to crime, they're being put into a community full of them. Depending on what connections a prisoner makes, they may end up more disposed to a life of crime when they leave than they were when they came in.
And for expiation, incarceration is probably grossly counterproductive! In theory The System has told everyone that "they've paid their debt to society" upon release; in practice any significant sentence length makes it difficult to maintain relationships with non-fellow-criminals (and nearly impossible to continue providing friends/family/dependents any support) and difficult to find a (legal) job when the punishment is over. Arguably these are the most punishing aspects of prison, but they're also precisely the aspects of an offender's life we want to encourage, not punish!
roystgnr
18d ago
Once there were enough non-nerds there, it wasn't the early days of the Internet anymore.
I was going to say "borrowed time", but looks like the majority of the answer may be "Universities"? The first stats I found showed black people making up 4.1% of Google tech employees vs 7% of Computer field employment. That's barely more than the ratio of underrepresentation that white people have among Google tech employees. (which might also be a factor? "you picked too many whites" can become a lawsuit even without allegations of racial animus, but I'd expect "you picked too many Asians" to raise eyebrows in any crowd less racist than a Harvard admissions committee)
Edit: I initially misread that 7% as being "CS degrees", rather than employment in the field as a whole. It sounds like the gap among new graduates has narrowed, if "In computer science fields, Black students earned 9% of bachelor’s degrees, 13% of master’s degrees and 7% of all research doctorates over the 2017-2018 school year." Comparing Google's cumulative hiring stats over decades to new graduate stats a few years old is a bit apples-to-oranges, but if I were one of Google's legal compliance people I'd now definitely be looking for some apples-to-apples and oranges-to-oranges numbers before I felt safe.
roystgnr
19d ago
Oh, there's no general consensus; to non-nerds the original perpetual internet flame war may have been Kirk-vs-Picard, but to nerds it was vi-vs-emacs.
I'm a happy vim user, but I would recommend it if and only if you expect to spend a significant portion of your life editing text; it's great to use but time consuming to learn.
I have a lot of coworkers, including the ones who wouldn't touch Windows with a 10 foot pole, who are big fans of Visual Studio for C/C++ development, but I don't know how well it works for Python.
roystgnr
19d ago
I'm not much of a Python guy in particular (though I think it's fantastic that the same language is useful for both teaching kids and writing cutting-edge software; when I was a kid we had various forms of BASIC, which were used for and useful for neither).
But my most useful tips are language-agnostic:
Write and comment and document (three separate things!) all your code so thoroughly that even a complete stranger doesn't need to ask you questions to understand it all. This doesn't sound so important for a "sole developer" role, but at some point you'll have to extend some of your own code that you haven't looked at in years and you'll be the complete stranger who can't ask your past self questions.
Cover your code with tests. Set something up to automatically run tests before allowing any new merge (I'm assuming you're using a version control system; if not then let's call that tip #0). You will write bugs, but it won't matter so much as long as you're the first person who's hit by them, because then you have a chance to make sure you're the only person who's hit by them.
roystgnr
23d ago
Same Keynes, but different context. I'm actually curious about what @CloudHeadedTranshumanist meant by that qualifier - that even if Zendaya might not be the most beautiful in many particular judges' minds, she would clearly be the most widely-perceived as widely-perceived as beautiful?
She toned it down for Spider-Man: Homecoming (where her character wasn't supposed to be a Love Interest yet), with just hair/wardrobe/body-language choices that you'd think would be another "Hollywood Homely" trope but which worked okay, but even there claiming only 3/10 would be silly.
roystgnr
25d ago
Yeah, "assuming future research doesn't have any surprises" was a predicate here, not an actually-safe assumption. Sure would have been nice if we hadn't stopped the research a decade ago.
roystgnr
25d ago
and it's a very short story.
It's a collection of ridiculously short stories. Designing for open-world play maximizing player freedom means having lots of independent quest lines, none of which can be hastened by a training montage or a time skip. The power-fantasy "Chosen One" trope means that many of those arcs are expected to scale from stranger-off-the-street origins at the beginning to change-the-world consequences at the end. Designing for the player to get to experience all those quests means they need to be individually short enough that the game as a whole can be considered "completed" within 40 or 50 hours. And yet this is a game, so even with fast travel the vast majority of those hours are going to be gameplay.
Put that all together, and the next thing you know your axe-wielding barbarian who learned a few spells is getting made the Arch Mage, and your suspension of disbelief is shattered.
roystgnr
25d ago
Why does it seem impossible for Hollywood to write stories about people? Regular people, working-class salt-of-the-earth human beings?
The theory I've heard is that they can't sell the stories afterward.
Currently they're making their profits off blockbusters, where after putting a quarter billion dollars into production and marketing you've got too much on the line to risk your dialogue not being trailer-worthy and lowest-common-denominator approved, and if you know your best sequences are going to be CGI kaiju fighting, why would you shorten those just to buy time to make a side character slightly more well-rounded? But mid-budget films, the ones where they used to spend a few tens of millions of dollars to get back a few more tens of millions, aren't working out so well as they used to ... and yet it's the mid-budget range that used to occasionally spiral into massive box office successes and Oscar takeaways for the biggest winners, because they were in the sweet spot where they were cheap enough for directors to take risks, too cheap to replace characterization with special effects, and yet expensive enough to exhibit real production quality behind the risky ideas that worked out.
I have no idea whether this theory is actually true; there doesn't seem to be nearly as much overlap as I'd like between "people who actually know something about the movie industry" and "people who back up their theories with quantitative analyses".
roystgnr
25d ago
On #1: try the second button from the top on the right of the gas pump's screen. It's almost never labeled as such, but it's usually set up as Mute. I've heard of one pump brand that uses top right instead, but never encountered it myself.
roystgnr
26d ago
"Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country" was McCain's version. I'm finding claims that it was Romney who turned that into "gas station with nukes", though not particularly mocking of McCain, and that Obama's contribution to Putin's seething was to call Russia "a regional power".
Although, apparently this sort of metaphor is way way older than that. "Upper Volta with rockets" was the phrase coined (possibly by a British journalist) in the 80s, updating the German "Congo with Rockets" from the 70s and "Genghis Khan with a hydrogen bomb" from the 50s, and all of this dates back as far as a sentiment from the 1850s, popularized by Tolstoy after Emperor Alexander III's counter-reforms in the 1880s,
"It was not without reason that Herzen spoke of how terrible Genghis Khan would have been with telegraphs, with railways, with journalism. This is exactly what has happened in our country."
Research by Russia Today, so they make it clear from the title onward that these are all variants on "a lazy Russophobic slur", but frankly I'm still impressed they didn't kill the article outright.
roystgnr
26d ago
Add ocean fertilization and enhanced weathering to your list, assuming future research doesn't have any surprises and they really are reasonable ways to sequester carbon in the medium-term and very-long-term respectively. Even if plants don't notice a drop in sunlight (or they notice but are happy enough about the extra CO2 to be fine anyway), we're already about 20% of the way from pre-industrial CO2 levels to "people complain about stale air and drowsiness" CO2 levels outdoors, and indoor air relies on CO2 diffusion to outdoor...
But frankly I'd wait before starting anything. In the US the biggest obstacles to doing anything are: (1) about a third of voters don't think climate change isn't yet causing any harm and (2) phasing out fossil fuels is going to be a massive challenge, both economically (it will be a third phase of history, where the first two were "underpopulated and dirt poor" and "burning fossil fuels") and technologically (we need a massive expansion of fission and/or massive improvements in grid battery costs), so we're probably going to need a stronger political consensus. If we go for the geoengineering too early then that consensus is always going to be split between "we fixed it" and "no, the priests just sacrificed a virgin and pretended that that's what made the drought end".
roystgnr
30d ago
Is sleep deprivation low-risk? There are major negative long-term mental and physical consequences of chronic sleep deprivation, and there are wild (like, 3-4 days in is when the hallucinations usually begin) consequences of acute sleep deprivation, so while I don't know if there are any studies showing long-term consequences of acute sleep deprivation it's definitely something I'd look into before trying out a multi-day stretch.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Can't we just get along...by going to Mars or something?
That's a much better idea, I have to admit.
And we do have a massive humans-to-Mars project getting underway, so a quick examination of the public discussion of it will surely reveal just the culture-war-free cameraderie we're looking for. Let me do a web search now, right after taking a big sip of water...
roystgnr
1mo ago
The theory's not bunk, it's just obsolete. Even the upgrade from binary scores to continuum scores just isn't enough to catch up to something like OCEAN that generates bases for continuum scores via PCA rather than Jung+guessin.
roystgnr
1mo ago
I miss when Free Speech was a heavily left-wing-coded principle. I expected more right-wingers to start adopting it as they realized they were losing control of the culture and could no longer be confident of not getting the short end of the stick, but I was way too naive about how many left-wingers I expected to avoid doing the opposite.
roystgnr
1mo ago
You tell an entire people, "Sorry, you're not smart enough for tech or law. Have you tried the Foot Locker?"
What "entire" people? The most black-pilled anti-woke "IQ fits these shifted normal distributions and has unavoidable effects and measures all forms of intelligence and is entirely genetic" theory still only has about a 1SD racial difference, so it makes predictions like "there are only 6 or 7 million African-Americans smarter than the average white person" (41e6*normcdf(-1) in Octave) and "there are only 2 or 3 million African-Americans smarter than the average tech or law worker" (41e6*normcdf(-1.6)). Admitting that those numbers aren't nearly as high as we'd like them to be, so even if we observe them we should really be open to other explanations ... would that be the end of the world? Let's imagine that the most black-pilled pro-woke "Everybody needs role models who are specifically of their own ethnicity" theory is also true, simultaneously ... and we're still generally left with millions of good candidates! Not with the full ten million we'd have liked from a population that size, but it's at least an adequate fallback, no? Even at the top of estimates for college professors an IQ-based meritocracy would give us tens of thousands of high-end African-American candidates, way lower than we'd have liked, but still enough that there'd be no need to tell smart African-American kids aspiring to quantum physics research "try Foot Locker"; you could still just tell them "oh, you mean like those guys? great!"
Or even "anti-a-fraction-of-anti-Trumpers"? I think Trump was a depressingly sub-par president, but I'm still able to appreciate that the right way to beat him is "nominate someone much better", not "insist that prostitute hush money is clearly a campaign expense and prosecute misreporting it".
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