foobar2020

Chapter 2 has a plot of our understanding of the impact of all natural and human causes on the change in temperature: https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/img/figure/figure2_1.png

It's pretty clear (according to the models) that the human created aerosols combat a fair chunk of the increase caused by carbon emissions (around 0.7 deg C at the moment, which is substantial; we'd have already been around 2 deg C without it). Is deliberately increasing the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere a viable path forward? Is this economically feasible and safe? Can this be used to bring us back to the pre-industrial temperature levels?

Simple median is a very good (in many applications) nonlinear filter.

I don't know what it took but they did it recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17919297

Interesting. Do you have any sources where I could read about it?

Flynn effect is fascinating me - if it holds in the future we'll have, in developed nations, an average IQ of 130 (by today's standards) in 100 years. That's a LOT. It'd, roughly, mean that ~17% of people would be capable of graduating from today's Ivy League schools without problems (145 IQ or more). And there would still be the (new) top 0.5%. But whether it will hold is anyone's guess.

Right right, I'm not sure anyone really knows why this happens.

My point is that 15 points per half-decade is just baseline. Doesn't mean we've picked up any useful correlation.

Poles and Italian immigrants in the US raised their average IQ scores over the 1st half of the 20th century -- by over 15 points!

So did everyone else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

3 points per decade = 15 points per 50 years. So this shows that immigration to the US had no impact on the IQ of this group.

Whole developed world has very similar IQ levels to United States, except for China, Japan, Korea which have higher average levels: https://iq-research.info/en/average-iq-by-country

It's 19% of the capital gains, not of the invested money. The parent comment makes it seem like the tax is absurd. Here's a list of countries that implement this tax, including Poland:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax

You _can_ save and invest in Poland.

Well there are more people that are willing to pay than just Coinbase. A more comprehensive answer would be that arbitrage is not that up to speed in the Bitcoin world, especially in KRW and JPY markets: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets

Used to be that crypto is massively overpriced there, now it looks like Korea and Japan are leading this price fall.

Unicode to the rescue! Here's how to make 𝗯𝗼𝗹𝗱 text:

http://qaz.wtf/u/convert.cgi

Looks a bit ugly, but works.

SSD is probably not as fast as RAM, but it's much much cheaper, in the order of 10x per gigabyte. With SSD-GPU bridge you can have fast access to a multiple TiB training set, on a single machine.

Data pre-processing is indeed an issue, but hue adjustment/flipping/cropping could be implemented as Tensorflow operations, on the GPU. Similarly with input decompression - it would either have to be done on GPU, or the data would have to be stored uncompressed.

This would be incredibly useful for distributed machine learning - imagine a Tensorflow implementation that almost entirely bypasses CPU.

They do, if though nothing else then through multi-billion acquisitions. Another thing is that we all know crises come every now and then. Being tight on cash when it hits the market means you'll have to let talent go to your competitors, slow down infrastructure growth, reduce research freedom.

Without disagreeing that some portion of global profit comes from "taking things from the planet", do you think that all the value we've created since emerging from Africa somewhen between 50.000 and 100.000 years ago can be compensated with environmental damage? Or is it a recent trend? If we were to plot a graph, where the X axis is the time and the Y axis is profits/damage, how would it look like?

What about mathematics, arts and science? It sure has incredible value and eventually translates into corporate profit. For the most part I cannot see the corresponding environmental debt.

And to be more specific: what kind of damage did the three mentioned companies do?

I believe somewhere at the core of the issue lies inadequate recognition of the critical importance and difficulty of parenthood. It's crazy expensive, eats up half of your life, and sometimes gets very unrewarding. But it's so obvious that being a parent is crucial to the society! A civilization that sacrifices reproduction over GDP is bound to disappear. Contrast with f. eg. the Muslim culture, where children are the main source of pride of the mother.

At the risk of sounding condescending (I'm not) let's thank our mothers for bringing us into this world. Well done job moms, you really are the best.

While we are on this topic I would like to recommend to all who have not seen it yet "The Seventh Seal", Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece on dealing with death and God's silence when we face it. Action is set in medieval Sweden, during the time of the Black Death plague.

The opening scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4yXBIigZbg

I admit, it looks like it's quite hard to find many sources for this information. To the point I started to doubt it. I was basing on this article (in Polish), translation:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pl&tl=en&js=y&prev...

Fun fact: during the six-day war the Israeli military command decided to use exclusively Polish in communications, as a cheap and quick method of "encryption". Most commanders could speak Yiddish just as good as Polish. It worked, the Arab coalition intelligence could not understand a word.

Phage therapy is also present in Poland. There is a research centre in Wroclaw, they produce and send experimental samples upon request. The numbers look very nice, although it's still experimental - formal clinical trials have not been completed.

https://www.iitd.pan.wroc.pl/en/OTF/index.html

I bought some of these absurd notes to give tips in bars, or to light cigars. Sounds cheap, but always makes everyone laugh. Definitely recommend :)

I wonder why so few people in Europe realise that. Despite how bad the consequences are (eg. Greece). Luckily my country (Poland) still prints its own currency and manages its own monetary policy.

It is a reasonably good advice. After all there is plenty of programming work that does not require ever learning how does quicksort work or what is a mutex. Accessible to nearly anyone with increased intelligence.

Hmm, looks like you're right. It's interesting that the effect is so intensive.

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=probability

I doubt that NOx can be captured by such a filter. And according to the article particles level is already well below the limit.

All those probabilistic programming languages will become exponentially faster once we have feasible quantum computers, since BPP \in BQP. We currently use a weaker inclusion, BPP \in PSPACE, as the core execution model.

SQL took off as a way to wrap-up first-order logic over finite models into a form useful for programmers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_model

This is insane. I work as a software engineer in Zurich, and I'm able to set half of my net salary aside as soon as it arrives. Without any significant saving efforts.

That's really how I see that, as a joke. After all - who feels pressured by an anonymous internet comment?

Relax captain, it is just a joke. Go drink a beer with your friends, or not.

How do you know that?

There are limitations this system. Potvin says certain highly sensitive code—stuff akin to the Google’s PageRank search algorithm—resides in separate repositories only available to specific employees.

(...) all 2 billion lines sit in a single code repository available to all 25,000 Google engineers.