1propionyl

Would you put spaces around parentheses?

It would look ( to most people ) very strange.

No thanks.

As an interesting counter-proposal to wasting time with this... look for older less popular/downloaded/featureful apps written by people for their own education, edification and enjoyment.

They may not work the way you wish they would, but you can learn a lot from them, be inspired by them, and leave feedback.

That's how you actually encourage more people to get started and continue making their own tools.

Also, I imagine it's not easy to train a model to notice these "preconceived notions" and react "appropriately"

Then don't. It's easy enough to pay a teacher a salary.

It’s just a blog post. No academic is going to read it as more than a very promising early result.

The issue is that lay people read every paper or post as if it were a final proclamation. They’re not. Even a peer reviewed paper on the cover of Science or Nature is still not “proof” of anything, science doesn’t produce positive confirmation. It produces evidence that taken together suggest one prior is more likely than another.

Bayes Rule is very intuitive. We update the prior by the likelihood of the evidence under a given prior divided by the likelihood of the evidence. That’s all it is.

Unfortunately, there is a very strong motive to flag plant. Academia is a water full of sharks.

It doesn't really surprise me that's possible. I've landed by accident in a very recognizably DMT state when the stars aligned. It can happen, I just don't generally buy claims of "naturally". It's a preexisting state, but getting into it requires such a shock (such as flooding the brain with exogenous DMT) to enter.

That's not the same as the Bufo state which I can't really imagine entering naturally, is it actually like that or just in the ballpark?

Would love to hear about your experiences. Get in touch!

It’s not even a well-defined question to ask "what is the best action".

To ask that in the context of a fight (not a bounded game like chess) is already to assume the existence of a complete utility function on which to measure it. That’s:

1. Philosophically, putting the cart before the horse.

2. Computationally, asking for the function that is the entire universe. Any utility function you define, an adversary (say, God) can find edge cases it doesn’t account for, endlessly. Chess has a finite state space; a fight doesn’t. Formalizing this hits the usual incompleteness and undecidability limits.

You’re claiming a perfect map exists (Platonist position); I’m saying that if such a thing exists, it’s just the territory itself, which isn’t a map (Nominalist position).

Technologists in particular, taken as a group, have a very specific philosophical outlook that they don't tend to interrogate in themselves because it's so pervasive and intrinsic to what they work on and how they do so. Fish unaware of water, so to speak. It's a set of assumptions that make sense when you're programming software, but break down when applied to other things in the real world.

The tend to assume the universe is deterministic.

They tend to assume (incorrectly) that because it's deterministic a good enough model will be able to predict or explain.

They tend to ignore or not even be aware of the inherent bias towards available and measurable data, or that what we can measure must capture the essential dimensions of it.

The most naive tend to assume that given enough data, a model will get better, that the noise will "average out" (it doesn't).

I don't have a good name for this, but it has all the trappings of a good -ism otherwise.

Beyond philosophy, they should study art, music, literature, and whatever else interests. They should spend time with others who do and not only with people who work in technology. Unfortunately, increasingly college CS programs have cut out general education requirements in favor of questionably useful skills training, leaving graduates in a state where this seems daunting.

Computer scientists are building the world we all have to live in. Is it so much to ask that they be educated in the humanities before they're turned loose to do so?

No, it is not. First of all the territory isn't fixed. Second of all the existence of a fitness landscape (let alone ocean) doesn't guarantee the existence of unique optima, nor that the ones you identify aren't in a second or less your loss because your opponent read you. The other person's behavior is unpredictable but can be guided, and likewise. Feints are a huge part of fighting.

To think you can identify a model in this situation is pure hubris. Absolutely no one who fights thinks this way. Fighting is NOT LIKE CHESS.

This fundamental faith in modeling is dangerous. It overestimates its own applicability, and ignores its predisposition to only focus on the most available data (under the incorrect assumption that if you collect more and more it will eventually "average out").

At that point the map is the territory.

As someone who has gotten a lot out of psychedelics therapeutically, you are correct. Psychedelics do not in of themselves grant any insight or wisdom beyond perhaps raw experiential evidence that our senses are fallible and our perception of the world is an artifact of cognition.

Past that, psychedelics are (kaleidoscopic, funhouse) mirrors. In the hands of a curious and humble person they can (in addition to being a lot of fun shared with like-minded others) be valuable therapeutic tools for approaching firmly rooted hangups, attitudes, etc. In the hands of someone like your friend, you get what you observed.

Both are commonly occurring patterns, and if you know a person's character even a little well you can usually predict how they'll engage with and come out of the experience.

To quote Shulgin,

The most compelling insight of that day was that this awesome recall had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of a white solid, but that in no way whatsoever could it be argued that these memories had been contained within the white solid. Everything I had recognized came from the depths of my memory and my psyche.

Even in extremis: A fist-fight is a sequence of biomechanical optimization problems, and there's always a "perfect move" at any given moment in time.

No, it is not. And no, there isn't.

This is exactly the sort of reductive mode of thought the article is calling out.

They can call themselves empiricists all they like, it only takes a few exposures to their number to come away with a firm conviction (or, let's say, updated prior?) that they are not.

First-principles reasoning and the selection of convenient priors are consistently preferenced over the slow, grinding work of iterative empiricism and the humility to commit to observation before making overly broad theoretical claims.

The former let you seem right about something right now. The latter more often than not lead you to discover you are wrong (in interesting ways) much later on.

Yes, specifically when it comes to open-ended research or development, collocation is non-negotiable. There are greater than linear benefits in creativity of approach, agility in adapting to new intermediate discoveries, etc that you get by putting a number of talented people who get along in the same space who form a community of practice.

Remote work and flattening communication down to what digital media (Slack, Zoom, etc) afford strangle the beneficial network effects.

A lot of overwrought digital solutions here and not the obvious one:

Stop selling online.

Sell the tickets at a small number of locations near and including the venue, with cashiers empowered to deny suspicious transactions.

Could someone put together a small army of smurfs to buy up all the tickets in major cities? Sure. Could someone have someone on the inside sell them a block of tickets against policy? Sure. We can handle these cases on a locale by locale basis with a convenience trade off that seems appropriate to the place.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good, and even worse, don't let overwrought privacy-invading and non-accessible digital solutions (that create a playing field tilted towards bad actors equipped with AI tools) be the enemy of a dead simple analog real-world one that leverages our best reputation management system: ourselves.

I don't know what to say other than "I sure hope not".

You go to IKEA!

In practice it does not. If you have had something with FindMy tracking stolen you may know what apartment block it's in, but not what unit.

Police won't or can't do anything if it could be in multiple units or would require any kind of warrant for the building as well as the specific unit you think it's in.

If you're "lucky" some might chaperone you knocking yourself, which itself is not something most want to entertain.

On account of police policy, AirTags are effectively useless for actually getting anything stolen back. You'll get more use out of them in filing your insurance claim if the theft of the item is covered under for example your homeowner's insurance policy.

Try buy a TV without smart features.

Easy. Just buy a dumb monitor. Why do you even need the TV tuner?

Different people evaluate cost/benefit trade offs differently than you do, and don't speak of the matter with metaphorically charged terminology like "abuse", "prison", "Stockholm syndrome", etc.

Forums, perhaps. But small group chats (which I suppose are technically "dark") are the bedrock of the current internet writ large and where most of the content that filters up to places like Twitter comes from.

Depends on 1) where the university is located (CoL), 2) if they went on strike recently to get paid enough to pay rent.

You can reliably assume that PhD wages must eventually converge to the rent of a studio apartment nearby + a little bit (which may or may not be enough to cover all other expenses. Going into debt is common.)

Honestly paper, parchment and stone have a pretty bad record as a format. They either degrade or even if preserved can become unreadable (e.g. Linear B) without a surviving linguistic community. Even when the text survives and is rediscovered, translations produced with century-scale gaps often lose subtext or connotation that would still have registered across a narrower gap.

I'd suggest an unbroken chain of oral transmission...

Real estate still shot up in lockstep with the rest of the world because you can't and you won't build faster than people who see homes chiefly as an investment buy property.

Excellent put. The bitter pill underneath that though, would seem to be that we may need to reconsider to what extent real estate should be assumed to be an investment that always appreciates in value.

Reconciling that with families very reasonably expecting to be able to build or maintain wealth through their largest lifetime purchases is... never going to be a pleasant discussion.

On some level I hope he tries. There's already mounting hostility on the populist wing of the right towards Elon. Going after anti-trust might just be the bridge too far.

And frankly, given his public comments about and noted vitriol towards Lina Khan and the FTC (and his own tendencies towards seeking monopolies) I assume at some point he'll try.

Further, purely speculating: it may be he already has tried. It's indicative that we didn't immediately see him go for the FTC. He's too small of a man to not have wanted to for personal reasons, and too greedy to not have wanted to for long-term business reasons. I have to wonder if he was restrained from doing so on account of (correctly) predicted blowback from such an action.

Seeming to come down on the side of John Deere and DuPont subsidiaries and spinoffs is not a smart move. These are hot issues for the populist wing of the party who want to purge what they label as the "Con(servative) Inc" wing and routinely make hobbyhorses of issues affecting farmers in flyover states.

You might be surprised to learn (it surprised me too!) that the new FTC leadership has affirmed Khan and Kantor's 2023 guidelines on anti-trust and stated they will carry forward with them.

It's an odd situation where more aggressive anti-trust posture is actually rather popular with Trump's base. Anecdotally, I know several 2024 Trump voters who cite Khan's FTC as the thing they liked the most (or only) under Biden.

I tend to agree with you otherwise, but this issue does have a bipartisan consensus forming and it's unwise to seek conflict where you share values.

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/trump-enforcers-affirm-li...

This is all downstream of consolidation of ownership in private equity of clinics, community health centers, emergency rooms, veterinarians offices, end-of-life care facilities, etc.

This is what happens when you let the bean counters and MBAs a quarter turn around the world with no on-the-ground experience or institutional knowledge make decisions from their spreadsheets to "optimize out inefficiencies".

Let's call it what it is: strip mining.

It depends on what you're trying to do. I would in general only expect such substantial speedups when considering writing computation kernels (for audio, video, etc).

Compilers today are liable in most circumstances to know many more tricks than you do. Especially if you make use of hints (e.g. "this memory is almost always accessed sequentially", "this branch is almost never taken", etc) to guide it.

It's not a matter of compiler stagnation. The compiler simply isn't privy to the information the assembly author makes use of to inform their design.

Put more simply: a C compiler can't infer from a plain C implementation that you're trying to do certain mathematics that could alternately be expressed more efficiently with SIMD intrinsics. It doesn't have access to your knowledge about the mathematics you're trying to do.

There are also target specific considerations. A compiler is, necessarily, a general purpose compiler. Problems like resource (e.g. register) allocation are NP-complete (equivalent to knapsack) and very few people want their compiler to spend hours upon hours searching for the absolute most optimal (if indeed you can even know that statically...) asmgen.

I'm sure the condescending attitude and negative stereotyping will sway readers.

livable habitats beyond Earth

Fetuses do not properly develop in the womb outside of Earth gravity.

Sorry. End of the road for that sci-fi pipe dream.