huffpopo

I left SF before the election, I could tell early on that Trump was going to win and figured free speech clampdowns in SV would follow and I knew my work was going to be affected. I worked in search and I remember the scandal within the industry when Yahoo accepted money from the Chinese government to censor pages on the 2008 tainted milk scandal. They charged $10K per link. At the time Google was seen as a beacon of free speech and 'do no evil' which was a nice contrast to Yahoo which is apparently OK with killing babies for a small buck.

Now Google, Twitter, Facebook etc. are all finding excuses to allow various meddling of the search results. There is too much money in it, it is inevitable.

Free speech is important to me because without it we quite literally end up killing babies for very small amounts of money.

Ah, I consider them human with human faults and incentives. One really sad aspect is that a major killer of helicopter pilots is cutting corners on preventative maintenance in order to save money. I feel like we need to be honest on what people are like.

I'm curios on the 10+ downvotes this received since posting; would someone care to give me a reason. Thx

Drones have harder parts and I would expect hardness to play a big role in damage done. But it doesn't even need to be hard, raindrops can also do a fair amount of expensive damage.

Helicopters are slow, and they probably didn't have the rotor speed needed to yank the collective.

Hitting a 2kg drone would result in expensive repairs, e.g. $30K for replacement rotor blades and you still might crash.

I probably would have taken the hit but I'm much better off than the average R22 pilot who often operate or razor thin margins.

That said; my bet is that there was no drone. My guess is the student made a small mistake, the teacher took over and made a bigger mistake, and both want to keep their jobs/future carers. Drones make an easy target to lie about and are hated anyway. Not to say there are no irresponsible drone pilots, just currently I think it's more likely heli-pilot error at this stage. My hope is the GPS tracking in the phantom well let us know for sure.

No apology needed, it was a subtle joke. It looks we both got flagged for it.

I'm not really letting it slide, I was extending the premise by pretending to be a sympathetic genocidal nazi, which I hope is still absurd enough to be presumed sarcasm. I'm aware that the joke may not age well so I was happy to get it in while I still can.

The CoC complaint is amazing and has me really worried about Rust and I wonder where the adults are. Usually Meta Language people are meritocracy driven so I'm surprised to see a feminist infiltration. GoLang I could understand...

https://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/6whs2e/multiple_coc_v...

I'm willing to let her insitements for genocide slide, it happens to the best of us, but what really worries me is her plan to "improve Cargo by incorporating best practices from npm".

It's common to back channel that information, I have a hard time believing that there was any chance his name would not have come out.

He was also doxed in the regular sense by left wing trolls (which do exist). In one example he was stalked, harassed, and had his photo taken and released from a rather private event.

James Damore didn't leak his memo to the public, he was very much doxed first. It sounds like some people can't take what they dish out.

If you mean Samuel Brannan, then you make money by diverting church funds to pay violent gangs to establish and maintain a shovel monopoly. Then you lose it all to a real estate crash and a divorce.

So the real lesson is be immoral, break the law, diversify and don't get married.

It's not like he is the only one who thought of selling shovels with huge markups.

The whole shtick is about lowering expectations.

Even if James Damore does not win Google has a number of practices that could be considered embarrassing if they were to be made public. I know a number of Googlers who confide to me privately about their experiences. Traditionally they would not have an outlet to express their grievances because no-one really cares. I'm hoping this lawsuit will give them and others a chance leak some of these practices. I'm interested in what people outside of SV tech bubble will think about it.

I was talking about backtesting of the models to see if they would have predicted the past correctly. I.e. You run the model from 1970 to today and measure how close the model prediction is with the actual measurements. If it's too far off then obviously the model is wrong and changes are made to try to improve it.

Yes; but it seems your answer to my question is that I must also have several decades of experience.

The group leaders were pushed things too far for me to accept as legitimate but not far enough to produce the results needed. We were aware of others that pushed things even further and they got to continue working. This adds a selection criteria bias to those still doing the research which has me trusting them even less. And this was before ClimateGate which made the shenanigans done by other groups public.

I make no claim that climate change isn't happening. Being between the modeler and the results meant it was my job to explain the result to the modeler. So criticizing climate change models within the scientific community was my job for over a year and a half.

I think you're being too harsh on my former colleagues, they were not evil or even particularly bad people. Hyperparameter tuning is necessary and future pollution is often accidental. The problem is when the tuning is goal seeked and the future pollution is not accidental and these problems are endemic to the industry and science in general. CRU East Anglia of Climategate fame went much further and actually published their results and I'm pretty sure none of them are in jail.

My colleagues left the industry which makes me less optimistic about those who stayed.

~2006-2007, and it was a continuous stream of models. I was between the modellers and the cluster so I would rewrite the models to work on cluster.

Like a #metoo movement for scientists. AFAIK Hyper-parameter tuning is fairly normal and necessary given how easy it is for the models to become unstable on their own and future polluting is often accidental. It can come down to judgement calls and difference of opinions as to what degree of intervention is acceptable which leaves a lot of wiggle room If you removed all future pollution and and left hyperparameters at the initial best guess you often end up with crazy results in backtesting. E.g. if our past predictions were correct then we should be living on Venus right now which obviously we're not so we must need different hyperparameters. My former colleagues were trying their best and even they knew their adjustments were going beyond reasonable. They never signed off on the final results so the project was politically useless and subsequently killed. They've all since left the climate change industry disillusioned as well.

I used to do research on climate change, specifically on combining land, sea, and air models together and getting them to run on a massive cluster. It was very important to the other researches that the models produce the 'right' predictions which at the time was runaway global warming. When the models didn't show this it was presumed that the models were wrong so hyper-parameters were tuned to try to torture the models to produce the 'right' result. When even that didn't work they went so far as future pollute the data. Disillusioned with academia I left to work in industry.

My question is this; How qualified and experienced do I need to be in order to be able to legitimately and completely distrust the climate change 'experts'? Because I feel like I've earned that right.

Sounds like risk management. I presume he wants to stay married but also wants to protect his business ventures by getting her to agree to a maximum payout. I've known many wealthy men who were completely financially destroyed by divorce. There is often no clean way of splitting a business and having to liquidate cash to buy the partner out can often sink the company.

On a related note, I consider Amber Heard as a risk to the whole Mars mission and get a bit nervous when I hear rumors of them getting back together. I wonder if I'm the only one.

Edit: I grew up in farming country and by far the biggest risk to farms there is divorce. This is insane given all of the other risks in farming.

As far as I can tell this is a side effect of optimizing the algorithm to encourage greater usage by discouraging limited usage. Asking FB, Twitter etc. to do any different is the same as asking them to make less money.

It should be mentioned that they gave up the nukes in exchange for perpetual guarantees of sovereignty and territorial integrity.

I do deep learning for a day job, this card is for me. Going on the specs it'll be worth it upgrading my 1080 TIs but I'll wait for a proper review before committing $12K.

I remember that, made me laugh and wonder; was Scotty really giving it all she's got.

Guess what number they'll accept and double it, put up a fight when they halve it, blame someone else when you miss it, and take the credit when you hit it. At most companies estimates are about control, expectation management, and blame distribution and not about information discovery.

Most people really suck at expectation management, much more than they suck at estimating work.

I feel bad for them as well. They are very trusting of their friends and USI Tech has a MLM mechanism to it.

At the moment they are pretty obnoxious about it and are feeling bad for me.

I live in a retirement town where many of the retirees have put their entire life savings and more into USI Tech. As far as I can tell USI Tech has properties of a classic pyramid scheme. I wonder how much this and other similar schemes are driving the price of bitcoin. I also wonder what will happen when entire towns get wiped out without recourse.

Unions use all kinds of unpleasant coercion to 'encourage' people to join them including black listing of scabs and companies that use them.