PokerPirate
11d ago
LLPSI is pretty intense for an elementary schooler. There's much better material for young learners. Minecraftium is a youtube playlist of a Latin teacher playing minecraft while talking latin, and is a good example of something in the same "natural" style but geared for the younger audience. It's not a complete course by itself, but there's lots of other similar material out there.
PokerPirate
14d ago
I think the phrase "quantum woo" vastly understates the potential impact of quantum computing on machine learning. The quantum algorithm zoo, for example, lists a number of quantum machine learning algorithms. Several of these get exponential speed up from classical algorithms, but even a quadratic speedup of grover's algorithm would be game changing at the scale frontier models operate on.
I agree that most normie use of quantum in the brain is "woo". And I also agree that it's not been established that the brain relies on any quantum effects. But there is actual legitimate research in these directions and it seems wrong to offhandedly dismiss it.
For those (like me) wondering why "female" should be related to "sucking", it's because the babies suck on their mothers breast. (See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/female and follow the etymology links.)
Another fun note is that the old-english for male was "weaponed" because their was a weapon between their legs: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/w%C3%A6pned#Old_English
PokerPirate
21d ago
I'd forgotten about this film. This is a really good suggestion... there's lots of fantastic themes in that movie. Thanks!
PokerPirate
22d ago
My kids are also into Harry Potter. They've started calling Neverending Story "white harry potter" just because the dvd case is white. It's a great story!
PokerPirate
22d ago
Oooh.. Ben Hur. I hadn't heard of that before, but it sounds fantastic. I'll have to watch it with my wife, and maybe with my kids when they're a bit older. Thanks!
PokerPirate
22d ago
Aaahh... I remember these from when I was a kid... my 2yo is super into dinosaurs right now, so that's likely to be a winner... thanks!
PokerPirate
23d ago
What are the all-time best movies / shows for kids to watch?
This Christmas, I watched the Home Alone series with my kids (6yo, 3yo, 2yo, 1yo). The movies are fantastic. They keep the kids engaged with humor, and they provide valuable lessons on family (you might think they're a pain, but they're still wonderful), independence (kids can accomplish a lot of things that adults can't and they should be encouraged to try), some seemingly bad people are good (the shovel guy/pigeon lady are scary at first but turn out to be great people in the end), and some seemingly good people are bad (the thieves dress up as cops and trick a lot of adults).
I want to find other similar movies to watch with my kids that are fun and full of great lessons. Does themotte have any recommendations?
PokerPirate
2mo ago
Is there really a norm against killing foreign heads of state in war? It seems to me like this happens all the time.
When the US invades a country like Iraq and declines to kill their leader, one of the main strategic reasons for this decision is so that there exists a clear person with authority to surrender. Often, when a leader is killed without surrendering, the armed forces splinter into a variety of insurgent groups and there is no way to achieve a diplomatic resolution to the conlfict anymore.
This argument suggests that Putin would have a strategic reason to not kill Zelensky, but Zelensky has no corresponding interest in not killing Putin. My guess is that if Zelensky had the chance, he would definitely choose to kill Putin whether or not the US supported the decision.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
I'll add to this that BIOS passwords do not provide much security even in the ordinary context without armed guards. In order to do something with a BIOS password, you need physical access to a machine to type it in. But if you have physical access, you can also easily reset the BIOS password by removing a battery. (This would break a seal on the machine, but those seals can also be replaced.) So I don't think this leak of BIOS passwords meaningfully made the election less secure.
I'm still very much opposed to electronic voting, however, because of all the other ways they make voting insecure.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
I did look into this, and they generally require co2 cartridges and regular cleaning which reduces their cost effictiveness. I also have the goal of cutting the fuzzy drink addiction entirely at some point, and the regular bill reminds me I should be making progress towards the goal.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
I'm "down" to 3ish cans/day. That's still a $10 pack every other week = $250 / year. That feels like a lot of money to spend on water when the tap spits it out for free.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
I "accidentally" started drinking about 4 liters/day Coke0 after my kids were born to stay awake. (It felt safer to have a cold soda around babies rather than hot coffee, plus I like the taste better.)
I weaned myself off by drinking the sparkling water from costco. Still expensive, but no more caffeine dependency.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
For a robbery caught on camera, or a murder where the killer’s fingerprints are on the knife and his DNA is on the scene? What is there to argue about? Why is a defense attorney necessary? What do we gain by pretending that going through the (expensive, time-consuming) motions is valuable?
The purpose of a defense attorney is not to get the accused acquitted at all costs. Their purpose is to help the accused navigate an extremely stressful environment. That can include, for example, encouraging the accused to take a plea deal in the case of overwhelming evidence. There's a reason the vast majority of cases do not end up in trial.
PokerPirate
4mo ago
Github repo with course content: https://github.com/mikeizbicki/cmc-csci181-languages
All the lectures recorded and put on youtube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSNWQVdrBwoa4KNaiKr-ayUdROZdSZ_1E
(unfortunately the audio didn't capture on the first video)
PokerPirate
4mo ago
I'm teaching a class on LLMs right now, and the students are working on a project to use LLMs to answer questions about the current election. (They're using a RAG based system to pull in news articles to answer the questions, and they're next assignment is going to be to get the system to respond in the style of Harris/Trump.)
Anyways, to evaluate the students' work, I needed to create a dataset of US election facts. I call it the Hairy Trumpet dataset (github link), and I'm surprised I haven't heard this pun on the candidates' names anywhere else yet. I especially like the pun because hairy trumpet is also the name of a weird fungus, which seems fitting for a dataset on politics.
PokerPirate
4mo ago
That link is super interesting, thanks for sharing.
Two comments:
-
The U-shaped graph about the "political activism graph" directly speaks to the idea that the "middle is dropped out". What this graph doesn't show is that this phenomenon is getting worse (i.e. that the middle today are voting less than they voted 20 years ago). I interpreted your previous points as the middle is dropping out even more than it used to, and I don't see evidence of that.
-
What there is evidence for in your link is that the middle is getting smaller and the tails of the distribution are growing larger. This is different than "dropping out" (which I interpret to mean not voting but continuing to have the same beliefs and staying in the middle). It seems to me that the actual polarization of beliefs is what's causing the polarization of discourse/policy and not the fact that the middle has stopped participating as much.
PokerPirate
4mo ago
I agree. That's exactly the type of book that JTarrou should write.
PokerPirate
4mo ago
PokerPirate
4mo ago
My intuition is that the opposite happens because there's more people in the middle, and so pandering to the middle is more useful. At least in swing states where pandering actually matters.
Is there any actual evidence of moderates voting less than extremists?
Your previous stories/posts were full of fascinating small details about life as an infantry grunt and made great connections to larger themes in both politics and life. The stories had a blend of humility and grandiosity that was riveting.
This post, in contrast, is super boring. You sound like a Kvothe-wannabe (which I know you're not). I don't care what you write about, just get back to writing actual autobiographical stories, and we will all gladly read them.
PokerPirate
4mo ago
This doesn't make sense to me. Why would "the middle drop out"?
I assume that most people who believe that voting is a waste of time also believe that the major candidates don't reflect their preferred policies. This makes these "drop outs" by definition very far from median.
Dropping out should only matter if the two extremes do them at different rates. If dropouts are uniformly distributed or distributed at the extremes, then there's no change in the stability of the results.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
Trump’s instantly infamous remarks* at the NABJ conference have been universally decried and only sporadically defended.
I just watched that video, and wow! Trump did a fantastic job with the first 5 minutes of that interview. Whatever you think about his candidacy, there's a lot to learn about rhetoric here. He instantly disarms a very hostile question and builds great rapport with the crowd. I wish I had 1% of his skill as a speaker.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
This finally explains to me why Patrick Rothfuss hasn't finished The Kingkiller Chronicle. (The first two books definitely exhibit the "chauvanism" you're describing, but book 2 of the trilogy was published in 2011 and there's no signs of book 3 ever coming.)
When Bush walks over, Obama stands up to shake his hands like an old friend. Trump stays seated and neither he nor bush acknowledge each other. Then Obama and Trump are back to cracking jokes with each other.
More options
Context Copy link