javert

This is patronizing. Especially since the response was tautological. You should not assume that I know nothing.

I was interested in a little more detail. Is the home directory on another USB, or maybe a laptop's built-in SSD? To add new software, is he creating a new custom image every time? Is this practical as a daily driver?

personally I use a custom alpine live-usb that is immutable and I fully shutdown and start-up all the time. openrc doesn't give me any grief, the bulk of my startup time is copying my 500mb rootfs into a tmpfs

I'm assuming this is for a personal use computer. Can you talk more about the setup here? Sounds interesting. If the OS is immutable, where do you store personal data and how do you perform updates?

Perhaps the Tao of Pooh is better than the original Taoism, or is an improvement.

If you like TOP better, or think it's more correct, or more wise, that's fine.

(I don't think so, but someone else might.)

I also strongly disagree with some of the sibling comments which insist that Taoism does not have a non-mystical (i.e., non-religious) core. As a disclaimer, I'm not really an expert. But I can see that there is a wise and rational framework there, that does not depend on make believe.

I am impressed with the clarity of your thinking on this. Since you value epistemological hygiene, you might like Ayn Rand's work in metaphysics and epistemology.

I would highly recommend "The Parent's Tao Te Ching" by William Martin.

It's a retelling of the Tao Te Ching into plain English, using parent/child relationships to make the points.

I recommend this both to parents, and to children. Which is all of us. We never stop being children of our parents.

I don't have children, nor do I plan to, yet this is one of the most powerful books I've read.

I don't understand what part of this (if any) I cannot do at home. Couldn't I just run me_cleaner myself and then install the desired OS?

According to the article, a foreign ship can stop at multiple US ports, as long as it only offloads. A ship can go from DR to Jacksonville and stop in San Juan on the way.

People say PR is a second class entity, but I think almost any US state would be far better off with Puerto Rico's deal.

PR gets to harvest its own taxes, whereas the other states are tax fiefdoms for the Federal bureaucracy. This is truly a superpower for Puerto Rico.

In return, PR doesn't get to vote for president, or have senators or congressmen. But I can tell you, all those are worthless. My state's representatives (when I lived in a state) served the Federal bureaucracy in practice, not the people of the state. They are cronies for their political parties.

I personally believe that PR's mediocre economic situation is because their own elites steal all the money they get (like the $80 billion or whatever they defaulted on), and because the vast majority of Puerto Ricans have already gone to the States, creating a massive brain drain. I do not believe it's because of the Jones Act or some other form of colonialism.

A non-US ship can go to PR and then another US port. From the article:

"The concrete results are that a foreign ship can enter a U.S. port to drop off its foreign cargo, it can even from there sail to different U.S. ports to drop off other foreign goods, but it is not allowed to pick up any domestic goods in a U.S. port and bring those goods to another U.S. destination if it doesn’t meet the four conditions listed above."

I live in Puerto Rico. I'm curious about the actual mechanics of how the Jones Act affects PR. For context, I'm against the Jones Act regardless of the exact effects it may or may not have---but I'm still curious about the mechanics.

For instance, I used to believe we couldn't get produce from the DR without it first going through a US port (typically Jacksonville).

But in reality, the Jones Act doesn't prevent ships from bringing DR produce directly to PR, even foreign ships.

I'd like to get a specific example of something economically useful that the Jones Act forbids.

For instance, you couldn't have a trade route by a DR ship that goes San Juan -> Ponce -> DR, if you want to be able to pick up goods in San Juan and drop them in Ponce. But is that really useful, anyway?

Perhaps allowing non-US ships to brings goods between Florida and PR would be the biggest gain of dropping the Jones Act? Because shipping would be much cheaper. Like the case in the article where it's cheaper to bring fuel to the Northeast from Africa than from Texas.

Most people here enjoy that sort of story. I certainly do. Your comment wasn't tacky and didn't deserve a snide response.

This comment really stood out to me as being particularly nasty.

Most people here like hearing the sort of stories that your comment serves to actively discourage.

The paper refers to citation 53, which is this paper:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c04277

I'm still digesting this one and would appreciate input from anyone else who wants to read it.

As someone who lives close to the ocean, I'm concerned about the long-term health effects. I guess I'm probably breathing sea spray aerosols all the time. I can hear and see the breaking waves from my home.

Does this mean it isn't safe to live right next to the ocean?

I'm referring to the following sentence in the abstract:

Levels of PFAAs in atmospheric deposition are especially poorly reversible because of the high persistence of PFAAs and their ability to continuously cycle in the hydrosphere, including on sea spray aerosols emitted from the oceans.

Here is the actual paper (it's linked in the article): https://cryptoeconomicsystems.pubpub.org/pub/murialdo-physic...

It's a little bit hard to figure out if this work is:

a) a fascinating but ultimately impractical thought experiment; or

b) utter bullshit, a pollution of the signal/noise space; or

c) actually possible? maybe? (extremely unlikely...)

From my understanding, it kind of reminds me of physics papers on warp drives. Impossible, but there's still some sort of tantalizing intellectual idea that feels like it could go somewhere.

Our dependency tree has steadily grown to almost four hundred third-party crates, and we have thus far lacked a mechanism to efficiently audit this code and ensure that we do so systematically. (-Firefox)

Wow. This makes me feel like I have to stop using Firefox.

I wonder if others feel the same, or have a different analysis. For example, is the situation with Chrome better?

You could try and cheat in those papers but why bother? You'd just be undermining any possible future jobs in industry, so I find these papers to be pretty reasonable.

I was a grad student in CS for 8 years, but left without finishing the PhD. I wasn't in compilers, but that's a reasonable example because I was in some other "niche of a niche." Small community, fairly obscure.

Most of the grad students in my niche really just wanted to be professors. And the way to become a professor was to (a) publish a very high quantity of papers; and (b) make friends with all the senior people in our little niche.

The goal people had wasn't to amass power. It was just to get a tenure-track job. Somebody else in this comment section made a joke about Chinese students. The problem is not at all limited to them. But a tenure-track job at an American university really seems like heaven to someone who's made their way up from the bottom in China, for example. And also to some people from other parts of the world, including America. If publishing tons of low-quality papers is the path to that, and being buddy-buddy with other people, they go for it. It's a "I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine" environment, including regarding "peer" review.

There is a tradeoff between quality and quantity. I was doing empirical research. I couldn't compete with the people doing more pure mathematical/algorithm stuff. They could just spit out papers with some new obscure algorithm (that will never be used anywhere) and a proof of some of its properties. I would have been lucky to have 5 published papers at the end of my grad school career, but a good tenure-track candidate would have like 30.

The senior people, like my thesis adviser, more than enable this kind of behavior. They get grant money basically based on the quantity of papers published. I never understood why my adviser cared so much about grant money. Like, what drove him to put out a super high quantity of crappy papers, to have a ton of students, and get a lot of grant money? What's the point? I never understood it. I mean, he already had tenure. And there were lots of tenured profs I knew who actually just didn't care about grant money and publication count, and didn't do that. Which is great. But you know who all the grant money goes to, and then who has a huge "lab" with lots of students? The ones like my professor who really care about that sort of thing and optimize for it.

I think compilers produces much higher quality than my niche-of-a-niche (which I don't want to name, by the way). But I don't think an area like that is immune to the pressures I'm talking about. It's probably a bigger community (which helps), where the research just has a different dynamic. We could speculate why that might be. But nonetheless I would argue that every area of modern science suffers from the problem I'm describing, to a varying extent between countries and fields and sub-sub fields.

By the way, maybe people go into compilers as PhD students, wanting to go to industry... but the truth is, in computer science, getting a PhD is usually not advancing your career over just putting that many years directly into industry. If your planned route is PhD=>industry, it only makes sense if you want to be in an industry research position and if you care about that more than how much money you make.

This article repeats a common misunderstanding of how bitcoin works.

Bitcoin's decentralization does not come from miners. It comes from the fact that users will not recognize blocks that do not follow the protocol rules, as being part of the blockchain.

As a consequence, market participants will not pay as much for "bitcoins" that do not come from valid blocks.

The fundamental service miners provide is that proof of work is used as a "tiebreak" so that bitcoin users can determine the "true" chain among all the chains that follow all the protocol rules.

Miners really are just dumb utilities.

A miner staying within the rules of the protocol can do two things that are negative. First, a denial of service attack by mining empty blocks or censoring transactions. Second, executing a "double spend" if he has more than 50% of the hash capacity.

Those are serious considerations. But we cannot claim that bitcoin's decentralization is reducible to those two things. The current allocation of hash power among miners is actually far more distributed than what is really needed for bitcoin.

Implicit in all the above is, miners do not "vote." That can be a helpful analogy, but it shouldn't be taken too far.

I appreciate your thoughts.

I agree that pushing for cultural/political change is a hard way to go given the populism in America. I'm an American. On a personal level, I think the country is so broken that it's not worth fixing, and would like to expatriate.

Re: 60%, that's your personal estimate, right? My impression is that it varies a lot by field. In some fields you don't really get much invalid research at all, it's a curiosity. In other fields 100% of papers are useless because the underlying premises of the field are themselves wrong.

Yes, it was my estimate. But it's just a number I threw out there. I don't disagree with what you're saying here, but I'm more focused on the structural problems that exist to some (varying) degree in every field. For example, in every field, funding is corrupted. So I wouldn't say there are some fields that don't get much invalid research at all. Outright fraud is not the only kind of "invalid" research. It's still "invalid" if it's honest research but exploring the wrong path because there's some old fart at the funding agency who has a lot of friends who are exploring that particular path, which actually has been played out for 10 years already.

Blog post about Bill Gates

I appreciate your sharing this. I think it's easy to construct this sort of narrative. That doesn't mean it's true. It might be. I don't know enough to tell.

I really think someone like Bill Gates could see the kind of research validation institute I'm proposing as a "win." I'm not saying all the research he's funding is worthless. I don't believe that, personally. I'm just saying, we can boost the quality and effectiveness of research if we have this kind of institute. Maybe our research process as a civilization gets 2x better. To use military terminology (ugh), it's a "force multiplier." It's not saying all our existing research is garbage. It's picking off the low-hanging fruit, the worst offenders, and thereby improving the signal to noise ratio of research overall. And once you get all the worst offenders, you can look for less low-hanging fruit.

I bet Gates would be happy to admit a lot of the research he funds is "low quality." That isn't a personal indictment against him. He'd probably argue that a lot is "medium quality" and a lot is "high quality." I wouldn't disagree. I'm sure there is some proportion in all three buckets.

You're absolutely on the ball, except that everything is ~100x worse and more hopeless than you're describing :( Far from overstating it, you're understating it.

I mean, you can't get 100x worse than "60% of research is invalid."

Absolutely

If you get enough pressure on Congress, you can always make changes. I wish you wouldn't be so belligerent.

Society does change, but slowly. You would probably have said slaves will never be free, or women will never vote, or racial integration of schools will never happen.

Gates doesn't care. Like all the other sources of funding for public sector research, he wants to be a philanthropist cheerleader for Science™.

You don't know that. Unless you've read his secret diary, or something. I suspect he does care. And I think the evidence weighs more heavily on my side of the argument. But you aren't debating the evidence; you're just claiming to know, which you obviously don't.

The terminology here doesn't work. If you're calling something a "tulip," you're calling it an *unsustainable* bubble, because it comes from Dutch "tulip mania." But to take an easy example, gold isn't an unsustainable bubble. Neither is art. Not like Dutch tulips. It's too late to successfully redefine what "tulip" means.

Even if you use a different word, the category doesn't work. The fact is, bitcoin and ethereum are each sui generis.

Bitcoin, for example, differs from gold in *important* ways. There are various theories people have for why it might be able to hold value in the long run, and none of them are reducible to something that has existed before. It's a new experiment. People can argue that bitcoin won't hold value, but not by a 1:1 reduction to something that has existed before. On that note, the author is very right to point out that bitcoin is not, technically, a Ponzi scheme, and that point is much appreciated.

Valid points. It's an uphill battle, but still winnable over the long run. A big part of it is maintaining an extremely high level of scientific rigor and professionalism.

Take the NSF for example. (Pardon a US-centric example.) If you have a record showing that a particular PI has published 10 provably false/fraudulent papers, is the NSF really going to keep funding that person? At some point, the desire to avoid embarrassment and save their own skin may drive the NSF to de-risk by not funding the flagrant frauds.

Imagine if this were a world-class research institute, supported morally and with funding by people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk. Imagine if those people recognize that we can advance science and global progress much farther and faster if we tackle the epidemic of garbage research in academia (which I'd say is over 60%). Imagine running TV ads that say: "No, we are not right-wing nutjobs. There really IS a plague of garbage research."

(In fact, right-wing sponsors should be totally ruled out. As well as clearly left-wing sponsors. We want basically nonpolitical people who are basically trusted, like, again, Bill and/or Melinda Gates, Elon Musk, and so on. So, no Peter Thiel, which is unfortunate, because it would be right up his alley.)

But then you're publishing papers that try to replicate studies and specifically calling out specific frauds and getting their funding taken away, and more broadly arguing for funding agencies and academic departments to stop tolerating the culture of fraud and shoddy work. And you're calling out the worst offenders (in terms of academic departments and funding agencies) and calling on their political sponsors (like Congressmen) to cut their funding if they don't clean it up.

There may be areas of science where the foundation doesn't go, like climate change (maybe race?), because they are too heated. That's OK. It doesn't have to cover everything.

Part of the reason academia is really broken is, people aren't rewarded for proving that results can't be replicated. We need to find a way to incentivize that. The scientific process does not work without it. Also, academia doesn't allow people to just say, "This idea is wrong."

Academia is composed of a million little old-boys-club silos. You don't get into any of these clubs if you are not going to play ball. De facto, you cannot criticize your peers, if you are in academia.

For instance, the NSF has grant-award panels that are composed of researchers in the niche. So if you criticize your peers you literally cannot get NSF funding. Because your funding is literally gated by your "peers" as in "peer review." But if you were gonna be that way, you wouldn't have gotten a tenure-track job in the first place, because tenured professors only want people in the club to become their "peers" and sit on those committees.

I'm concerned I may be kind of overstating my case, but it's hard for me to know exactly how widespread the worst-case version of the problem is. Certainly what I'm describing can and does happen.

That made me laugh.

Much of the fraudulent work isn't coming from Chinese researchers, but much of it is.

If I were a billionaire, I'd fund a research institute whose only purpose would be to detect and call out fraud and shoddy work in academia. I'd hire the very best people I could in each field and put them onto this task. I imagine it would be easy to find excellent but disgruntled scientists in every niche.

You'd need to hire the best people with niche expertise. I know from my years in academia, nobody can understand and scrutinize your bullshit unless they work in the same sub-sub-sub-field.

The definition I found of sarcasm is the following:

"a sharp and often satirical or ironic utterance designed to cut or give pain"

I think the response I'm complaining about is satirical, so I think it matches sarcasm by this definition.

Anyway, even if hadn't been sarcasm, technically, it seems mocking and unkind. And it's not a big deal, but I think my response of "I don't appreciate that" was pretty tit for tat.

The free economy self-regulates. That's why it works. What I mean is, people won't buy your good or service if it sucks, or a better one is available. Companies that are mismanaged lose out to their competitors and go out of business. Any weakness or rot is self-contained.

The government doesn't have a mechanism to self-regulate. Democracy was supposed to regulate the government, and probably can in small societies, or perhaps if formulated the correct way. American democracy definitely doesn't regulate government, and it doesn't self-regulate, so it's a system that's out of control.

You see the same mechanisms (plus others) in many societies in the 20th century. I don't see any evidence or reason to think the government can manage the economy. And a big part of the causal explanation is what I've stated above. Another is that the government isn't omniscient; it doesn't have enough information. Market solutions don't need to be omniscient and price serves to carry information.

As an aside, fun fact: Did you know that in the US, price controls are used by a government committee to set the price of the fundamental good, which is the US dollar? That does a lot to disrupt price as a signal of information. People think in the US we don't have government price fixing, and they are wrong. (I use the US as a pet example but I guess the above is basically true everywhere.)

If someone thinks the negation of each sentence is self-evident, a good response is "I think the opposite is self-evident." No sarcasm necessary.

A comment that negates each sentence of what it's responding to is not using the "same device." It's being sarcastic.

Using the "same device" would be saying, "I think the opposite is self-evident..." and then elaborating.

I just wanted to say, I really don't appreciate the sarcasm in the first couple of paragraphs. Anybody can take someone's comment and negate each of the sentences. It's only clever and cute if the new version is kind of self-evidently true or somehow insightful. In this case, it's not.

You're also setting up a straw man with the comment about workers' rights. A call for the government to "fix inequality" with something like the New Deal is not a call for workers' rights. It's implicitly a call for the government to run much more of the economy than it already does. There is no other way to achieve the stated objective in the stated way.

Playing the old "fit about socialism" card is not impressive. I never used the word "socialism" because it's a slippery word that leads to low quality discussion. It's beside the point. Is every argument against government management magically defeated by the "OMG SOCIALISM" sarcasm that left wing people always trot out like this?

Also, probably needless to say, I disagree with your analysis.

edit: I will respond to the following:

In reality, it is very well known - by psychology, by statistics, and by empiricism - that societies that don't allow the most powerful to make unchecked decisions based on their current level of resources do better than those who do.

That's simply not true that this is "very well known." And you are conflating political power (which is what we call "power") with economic power (which isn't what we normally call "power"). The power of Bill Gates or Warren Buffet is limited mostly to doing good or just losing their money. That has nothing to do with the power weilded by, say, the Dept. of Homeland Security, or the American medical insurance industry (which gets its power through regulatory graft backed by political power and ultimately force). Forceful power, i.e. "power," is just not comparable to the "power" one gets by voluntarily trading with others.

It's silly to say your non sequitur is "well known" by "psychology" or "statistics" (what do those have to do with it, anyway) or "empiricism." That's nothing like my saying that something is "well known" to history. 20th century history is straightforward and direct (and relevant) in a way that psychology and statistics are not. We have tried big government management many times and it always fails. Look at the many communist countries that actually stayed communist (i.e. China doesn't count, but it's a shit show anyway). Look at fascist-nationalist command economies like the Nazis and today's Russians. Those societies and economies evidently do not work. (I would add, look at the outcome of the New Deal, but that is more nuanced.) There is no way a psychology paper could have that kind of evidentiary power.