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actually_a_dog

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actually.a.doggo@gmail.com

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arxiv.org 3y ago

An exponential improvement for diagonal Ramsey (numbers)

actually_a_dog
1pts1
siepr.stanford.edu 3y ago

Monetary Tightening and U.S. Bank Fragility in 2023

actually_a_dog
3pts0
www.wsj.com 3y ago

What Worked Against Covid: Masks, Closures and Vaccines

actually_a_dog
8pts13
twitter.com 3y ago

Imo most tech companies who rushed to full remote permanently made a big mistake

actually_a_dog
1pts1
www.cnbc.com 3y ago

Bill Gates: We will overshoot 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming

actually_a_dog
3pts0
cosmosmagazine.com 3y ago

New antibiotic passes through the first phase of clinical trials with ease

actually_a_dog
3pts0
www.bloomberg.com 3y ago

Ready to Work Until You Die? America Needs You

actually_a_dog
13pts5
www.commondreams.org 3y ago

It's Time to Call It What It Is: A Capitalism-Induced Ecological Crisis

actually_a_dog
17pts11
www.weforum.org 3y ago

Is there enough lithium to make batteries for EVs to get to net zero?

actually_a_dog
8pts9
threadreaderapp.com 4y ago

Personal MBA

actually_a_dog
2pts0
interestingengineering.com 4y ago

Scientists discovered a new molecule that kills even the deadliest cancer

actually_a_dog
22pts8
www.vox.com 4y ago

Earth is running low on wildlife. Plants will be next

actually_a_dog
4pts1
www.bloomberg.com 4y ago

Amazon Is Focus of Push to Curb 'Rank-and-Yank' Ratings

actually_a_dog
2pts0
blog.inf.ed.ac.uk 4y ago

We Could Write Nearly Perfect Software but We Choose Not To

actually_a_dog
7pts5
www.theguardian.com 4y ago

I’m a climate scientist. Don’t Look Up captures the madness I see every day

actually_a_dog
22pts3
ez.substack.com 4y ago

On the Edge of a Worker Revolt

actually_a_dog
5pts0
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 4y ago

Risks of all-cause and suicide mortality in mental disorders (2014)

actually_a_dog
3pts1
gilkalai.wordpress.com 4y ago

Combinatorial Theory Is Born

actually_a_dog
5pts0
www.bbc.com 4y ago

How working unpaid hours became part of the job

actually_a_dog
5pts2
www.livescience.com 4y ago

DeepMind cracks 'knot' conjecture that bedeviled mathematicians for decades

actually_a_dog
6pts3
aeon.co 4y ago

The seed of suffering

actually_a_dog
1pts0
www.theguardian.com 4y ago

Turns out, Harvard students aren’t that smart after all

actually_a_dog
11pts4
www.kelownanow.com 4y ago

There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

actually_a_dog
641pts449
www.theguardian.com 4y ago

Make extreme wealth extinct: it’s the only way to avoid climate breakdown

actually_a_dog
9pts0
www.theguardian.com 4y ago

We need to talk about the real reason behind US inflation

actually_a_dog
9pts12
gizmodo.com 4y ago

Climate Scientists Expect Catastrophic Levels of Heating and Damage Soon

actually_a_dog
2pts0
www.smithsonianmag.com 4y ago

Fifty Years Ago, the First CT Scan Let Doctors See Inside a Living Skull

actually_a_dog
2pts0
techcrunch.com 4y ago

Everything Amazon announced today, from smart thermostats to security robots

actually_a_dog
2pts1
www.sfgate.com 4y ago

The origins of the mysterious old telephone in my San Francisco apartment

actually_a_dog
5pts0
en.wikipedia.org 4y ago

Stolen and Missing Moon Rocks

actually_a_dog
2pts0

Well that and it’s hard to distinguish if you’re early in exponential growth or linear.

That's true, but not really saying very much. Any differentiable function is locally linear around a neighborhood of any point where the derivative exists.

Also exponential growth does hit some kind of ceiling relatively quickly.

Well... that depends. Much like how markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, exponential growth can often remain exponential for much longer than it takes to create a problem. Conversely, sometimes it can't remain exponential long enough to prevent a problem. Exponential growth is a hard beast to tame.

Yeah, unfortunately, I believe that one side effect of the human (sensory) nervous system having a logarithmic response curve is that humans are bad at understanding exponential processes. If you look at an exponential function on a log scale, you get a graph that looks linear. But, that's what fools people into thinking exponential processes are tame and easy to control.

The word itself suggest as much as well. "Mortgage" is derived from Old French mort ("dead") + gage ("pledge"). In other words, it was a pledge that was supposed to die either when it was paid off, or when the borrower defaulted.

And it seemeth, that the cause why it is called mortgage is, for that it is doubtful whether the feoffor will pay at the day limited such sum or not: and if he doth not pay, then the land which is put in pledge upon condition for the payment of the money, is taken from him for ever, and so dead to him upon condition, &c. And if he doth pay the money, then the pledge is dead as to the tenant, &c. [Coke upon Littleton, 1664]

https://www.etymonline.com/word/mortgage

20 watts standby is only about 14.7 kWh per month. Even at on-peak, summer PG&E rates, we're only talking about $7/month. Granted, I'd much rather pay $0 than $7, and I'd rather not waste energy, but we're probably not talking about anything close to the amount of energy the average household wastes. I'd be looking at refrigerators and other large appliances for energy savings long before I'd be thinking about how much electricity the TV uses on standby.

By "diversity," do you mean something like "entropy?" Like maybe

    H_s(x) := -\sum_{x \in X_s} p(x) log(p(x))
where X_s := all s-grams from the training set? That seems like it would eventually become hard to impossible to actually compute. Even if you could what would it tell you?

Or, wait... are you referring to running such an analysis on the output of the model? Yeah, that might prove interesting....

A friend of mine has shoplifted all kinds of random-ass shit. I'm talking like, oh, an entire dinette set, on one occasion; a canoe, and (unfortunately) only one paddle on another. And, oh, yeah, that $300 Dutch oven in their kitchen cabinet? Yeah, that's stolen.

So, I suppose, you may never know, huh? Because it could be.

When I was a math grad student, I technically could have gone through the process to get 1 or 2 CS courses approved to give credit toward my degree, but I never actually cared about the "credit" part, anyway. So, I did my regular course in the math department, taught for the math department, then hung out half the day in the CS department. I ended up auditing, and thoroughly half-assing, Algorithms 1, 2, and 3, Programming Languages, and Automata Theory. Still learned a lot, in spite of the half-assery.

ChatGPT Plugins 3 years ago

For the sake of argument, let's say yes, AI should be taken out of the hands of the private sector entirely.

But that's explicitly not how the game was set up.

Sorry, but yes, it was. It might not have been written down, but if all it took was for a few people to "scream bloody murder demanding the government make them whole," we need to look deeper at the implicit assumptions surrounding that system. And, part of those assumptions is that truly wealthy individuals get a greater level of service from that system than the rest of us, including bailouts like this. The same goes for "too big to fail" type institutions (viz JPMC and other big banks who are directly benefiting from a loss of confidence in institutions like SVB).

Wow, how is it that there's only one instructional book to learn Serbian? There are many books to learn Norwegian out there (which I'm familiar with because I have learned a bit of Norwegian in the past), and fewer people speak it than Serbian.

ChatGPT Plugins 3 years ago

Why is it hyperbole? Nuclear weapons and AI both have the capacity to end the world.

Almost everybody is dancing around it here, but the real lesson here for us all is that capitalism, or, at least the way we're doing capitalism today, is unsustainable. You simply can't have the kind of sustained transfer of wealth from lower and middle income people to the top 1% that we've had over the past 50 years and claim what you're doing is a sustainable system.

I recently saw this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th3KE_H27bs

The speaker, Nick Hanauer, has a net worth somewhere around a billion dollars. In his talk, he explicitly says he's a capitalist, capitalism is good, etc. But, if you ignore all that and look at the rest of what he says, he comes this >< close to advocating socialism.

According to him (and I agree), the lessons we should be learning here are fivefold:

1. Markets aren't anywhere near as efficient in reality as they are in theory. That leads to some counterintuitive things like when Seattle raised their minimum wage, it didn't lead to unemployment because the price of labor went up; it led to people who work in restaurants being able to afford to eat in restaurants, which is good for the economy. Oh, and unemployment actually fell in the region while this was happening.

2. A big pillar of the neoliberal myth is that "...the price of something is always equal to its value." He directly goes on to tie this to the case of one person who makes $50k per year and another who makes $50M per year. The second person's work isn't 1000x more valuable than the first. The person getting paid $50k is only getting paid $50k because workers have lost almost all their bargaining power in the market, period.

"And by pretending that the giant imbalance in power between capital and labor doesn't exist, neoliberal economic theory became essentially a protection racket for the rich," he goes on to say.

3. Humans are not "perfectly rational, and relentlessly self-maximizing." Homo economicus is a myth; let us bury him where he lies. Greed is not good. Humanity's superpower isn't selfishness, but reciprocity and a willingness to cooperate.

4. The purpose of corporations is not solely to enrich shareholders (i.e. the "shareholder primacy" theory). Customers, workers, and communities matter as much or even more than shareholders. Which leads to...

5. The laws of economics are a choice. If we want to do something about all this, all we have to do is choose to do it.

Finally, one thing he said in the talk really sums it up for me, and that's this:

"[I]t isn't capital that creates economic growth,it's people; and it isn't self-interest that promotes the public good, it's reciprocity; and it isn't competition that produces our prosperity, it's cooperation."

Unfortunately, the contemporary practice of capitalism is incompatible with these principals, and the people who are benefitting from it are very powerful as a result of decades of neoliberalism. Those people I mentioned in the bottom half of the income spectrum, they have the power to make change happen. Just look at what's going on in France right now.

But the people at the top (not the 1%, really, more like 0.1% and the 0.01%) have the poor, the middle class, and somewhat well off all at each others' throats. Without mass, collective action, I do not hold out much hope for humanity over the next two decades.

Oh, and BTW, keep in mind, this isn't just me, some random canine on the internet saying this stuff. I do say this stuff on here frequently, and what it's gotten me is mostly downvotes and being made into a second class citizen who can only post at an average rate of a couple comments per hour, for no good reason that I can discern or anyone will tell me.

So, if you believe these words, feel free to not believe me. Hell, I got myself about as close to banned as you can get without actually getting banned or shadowbanned by, among other things, trying to tell y'all these things. But do believe this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Hanauer, because he knows what he's talking about.