contravert

Watching the video, it's not really clear how this game is substantially different than a normal mobile game. What is the actual mechanism here for treating ADHD?

You definitely won't see anything like this in the US: https://www.businessinsider.com/china-tells-evergrande-found...

Like in 2008, bankers made a killing selling toxic products and socialized all the losses when everything came crashing down.

There is clear intellectual interest in comparing and contrasting why certain events receive outsized attention compared to objective outcomes (e.g. number of casualties).

I just want to add my $0.02 currently working at a games studio that is integrating AI generated art into our art pipelines.

Midjourney definitely generates really high quality art based on simple prompts, but the inability to really customize the output basically kills its utility.

We heavily use Stable Diffusion with specific models and ControlNet to get customizable and consistent results. Our artists also need to extensively tweak and post-process the output, and re-run it again in Stable Diffusion.

This entire workflow is definitely beyond a Discord-based interface to say the least.

Although smart contract audits are pretty much security theatre where the auditor charges $10k-$30k to run your code through a program, rug pulls are way more common just through simple methods.

A few common ways:

1. Use your admin privilege to withdraw or upgrade the smart contract to drain the funds

2. Withdraw all liquidity for your token and disappear

3. Sell the entire token supply all at once, which is functionally equivalent to (2)

4. Pretend to get "hacked" and lose your private key

5. Program a backdoor into the smart contract (the least common way). Some of these are economic in nature (e.g. frontrunning), which can't necessarily be found in an audit

Although a flashloan was used in this exploit, that's just a tool to leverage a fundamental flaw in the protocol. Flash loans clearly do more harm than good, so it's completely irresponsible for major DeFi platforms to still have this feature at this point.

The actual flaw is in Cream's oracle design for certain exotic long-tail assets. Basically, smart contracts need to get the price of an asset, and Cream was using the most naive way of simply calling the equivalent of asset.getPrice().

The reason this approach is critically unsafe is highlighted by this incident. A flashloan can alter price, borrow assets based on the new price, then return the price to normal before the transaction is finished.

This is not merely a coding bug but a basic design flaw that should have been caught by anyone with even a basic understanding of oracle design. It really reflects poorly on the competence of the entire DeFi space, considering CREAM is a pretty major protocol.

How many PMs does Core have compared to other PAs?

The problem isn’t really with SWEs but with the entire incentive structure of PMs and the product management chain.

They in turn are able to get more SWE headcount for these unfruitful ventures and end up failing upwards.

It's interesting how one can simultaneously think China is "war mongering" while at the same time see nothing wrong with advocating starting a war immediately.

This racist superiority complex is the pride before the fall. What exactly is TikTok's recommendation algorithms or Huawei's 5G technology cloning?

If the US didn't pay 3-4x the salary for software engineers compared to Canada, I wouldn't be here either. If China paid me more, I'd move in a heartbeat.

It's unbelievable how effective the west's disinformation, FUD and propaganda, lead by the US, against China has been. It's pretty much on par with the narrative leading up the the Iraq war.

There's even documents describing this blame China strategy as a way to deflect Trump's failures: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/25/senate-go...

Despite not having any concrete evidence, you don't trust China's numbers and that they have coronavirus contained. Have you considered that you might be thinking this way because of a coordinated propaganda campaign?

Objectively looking at the situation on the ground in China right now, life is going back to normal and there hasn't been massive outbreaks of covid19 and rushes to the hospital. You can't hide exponential growth if the virus was not contained.

Even in this thread, you can see more of the same insecurities. I personally think the Kübler-Ross model of grief is a surprisingly accurate model of this phenomenon.

In general, I think we're still in the denial/anger phase, with a trend towards the latter. You can literally feel the seething anger just reading some of the comments here.

Even based on such a short comment, you seem to have some serious problems with internalized racism. You clearly seem to think that being westernized is somehow better, and it's a "disappointment" that others have pride in themselves and their culture.

So the only reason that you feel "lucky" to speak Mandarin is so you can make "easy" money? Your purposefully don't associate with Asian people?

Don't "worry" about some stereotype or your "Asian-ness", but develop some god-damn pride in who you are.

I don't say this often, but this is straight up racism. You're painting an enormous group of people with a lazy and ignorant stereotype.

It's actually extremely easy to create new words using Chinese characters. You simply put existing characters together. To use some computing related terms for example:

mobile phone: 手机 （hand machine)

programming: 编程 （compose orders)

QR code: 二维码 （2d code)

hacker: 黑客 （black guest, this also sounds phonetically like "hacker")

For brands and other names, there is a system of transliterating sounds using characters, or simply a literal translation of the name, e.g.

Android: 安卓 (an zhuo)

Microsoft: 微软 （small soft)

Apple: 苹果 （literally apple)

I agree with you. The author even admits right off the bad that he failed to learn the language. I don't understand the mindset of someone who would write an article critiquing Chinese characters, knowing so little about them.

If the author can be taken this seriously given his self-professed ignorance, I am probably much more qualified than him to speak about Chinese characters.

There are two points worth disambiguating here. One is whether Chinese characters hinder the literacy of native speakers and the other is if it hinders that for learners. Neither I nor the author have any authority to speak about the former.

As a heritage speaker, I actually only recently learned Chinese to a level where I consider myself literate. My experience was that the characters were not an obstacle, like the author suggests, but an indispensable tool for rapidly learning the language.

To learn any language, it is unavoidable that you need to memorize thousands of new words. Memorizing a Chinese character is not much harder than memorizing a word. However, the magic of Chinese characters comes when you combine them to form actual words.

The vast majority of Chinese words consists of 2 characters, but because each character also encodes meaning, you can more often than not guess the meaning of a word you have never seen before.

Although you can take advantage of common roots for words in other languages, the scale is simply incomparable. For other languages, you pretty much have to memorize every new word you see.

My experience has been that learning Chinese characters may be a higher upfront cost (although I disagree), once you learn enough, you rapidly understand way more vocabulary because characters themselves encode semantic information.

Perhaps it's simply the lack of any cognates between English and Chinese, and a tinge of cultural supremacy, that make people, like the author, think it's Chinese characters that's the root of everything that makes the language difficult to learn.

Lower-priced but "lower-quality" is one of the quintessential properties of a disruptive technology. You can probably apply this to all electronics manufacturing, from smart phones to consumer drones. Could smart phones have become so ubiquitous if each cost over $1000 to buy?

China doesn't want to end up like Europe, which has no major Internet companies of its own on the same level as Google or Facebook. There has been immense political consequences and soul searching in the EU, and they are trying to push a single digital market concept to better compete against American firms. However, it remains to be seen how effective this strategy will be.

Yeah, just look at the trade deficit: https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html

Unless China is just giving the US manufactured goods for free, that money has to be buying something.

There are even more American kids with the same amount of money.

You just don't notice the international students who come from modest means.

There is diversity and then there's "diversity". This is ultimately a Americentric political movement. You only see American demographics as targets, ignoring the vast number of immigrants and foreign students that enter the industry.

When is the last time you heard someone advocating for more linguistic or geographic diversity? If these diversity advocates truly care about these studies for something other than political gain, they would be at the front lines advocating for more H1-Bs.

How sure are you about that? Most "white" people don't actually fully integrate to the culture, despite marrying and raising kids.

Take a look at this video about a Chinese villager with Russian ancestry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rS30IjG05c

He is completely culturally Chinese, although in a rural kind of way, in his speech and mannerisms. If you can read Chinese, the comments are very inclusive.

"Non-Asian" people have settled in China for hundreds of years, especially Arab traders who arrived through the silk road. Multiculturalism is not a foreign concept in China.

You missed a word! It's actually Alphabet's Google's Google PLAY Music All Access

You can literally apply this same logic to any form of discrimination:

Paid less because of your gender? What good does complaining do? I suggest you work harder.

Injustly stripped of your property? What good does complaining do? I suggest you start a business.

Forced to sit in the back of the bus? What good does complaining do? I suggest you exercise more so you can walk longer.

Profiled by the police based on your skin color? What good does complaining do? I suggest you dress better.

Ostracised from society because you're gay? What good does complaining do? I suggest you hide it better.

Assaulted because of your religion? What good does complaining do? I suggest you learn to fight.

You should understand that behind every complaint is an implicit call for collective action, which is the only way to solve problems these types of problems. Dismissing these grievances, like you're doing here, has the affect of discouraging not only the person being discriminated against, but also other victims. Even if you aren't doing it consciously, your attitude smothers attempts at collective action maintains the status quo of discrimination.

Okay, I briefly scanned through your comments as you suggested, and you have nothing to support your claims except stereotypes. You even admit you don't speak Chinese, so how exactly can you properly evaluate the "ability to think critically"?

Your comments are racist because they rely on stereotypes and not facts, and basically have an undertone of racial supremacy (i.e. The Chinese can't think critically but we can).

You can throw in all the anecdotes you want, but they do nothing to refute facts and data. Your experience as an expat (especially since you can't speak the native language) is in no way representative or inclusive of a country of 1.3 billion.

By lazily reducing the world into simple racial stereotypes, explained only by anecdotes, you are basically surrendering to selection bias. Every Chinese who meets your stereotypes will reinforce your world view, but you will conveniently ignore or mark as an exception anyone who doesn't.

How is this stereotype-laden rant the top comment? Your racist assertions addresses nothing to do with the article, and only sate the wishful thinking of those insecure about this piece of news.

Fantasy has disturbingly racist undertones if you examine it closely. For example, why is it "authentic" that all humans in Warcraft are lily-white Europeans, and all other ethnic counterparts are fantasy humanoid races.

I always found the free market argument hard to believe.

Why is it you can hire a world-class nuclear physicist or neurosurgeon for less than a percent of what a CEO is paid?

Harvard's endownment earned over 12% annually averaged over 40 years (http://www.hmc.harvard.edu/investment-management/performance...). I bet the government would love to tax some of that money.

The less measurable your admissions criteria, the more subconscious bias seeps into your decision making process. You can not extricate the perverse stereotypes that exist in society when making a decision whether a candidate is "diverse" or "well-rounded".

There have been numerous studies showing that whites favor meritocratic admission criteria, but reverse their position when shown the high percentage of Asian admits (e.g. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/670664?uid=2&uid=4&sid...). Indeed the data also shows that white admissions are barely affected in comparison to Asians (e.g. see the MCAT admissions data linked elsewhere in this thread).

It seems to me that the shroud of "diversity" is being used to preserve the existing white power structure in elite universities, especially with the prevalence of legacy admits.

Anyone who has designed a system knows that you can tweak variables to get your desired result and then tautologically justify your decisions post-hoc.