kilgnad

obviously he's talking about the part of the brain that matters. Nobody is comparing anything to say the part of the brain that controls your heart rate. You're just being pedantic here.

Comments like this should be banned from HN. It's used deliberately and manipulatively to characterize the other person as "unhinged." It does not promote useful discussion and is a clear violation of the rules.

I just have a lot to say, and I like to use capital letters to express it. It doesn't justify tactics like this of "chill bro". If you have a response, just say it.

It's describing an LLM.

When we start to lose our minds the unguarded core functionality of the system becomes more and more exposed. And as it becomes more exposed it starts to look like chatGPT.

Because as much as we don't like to admit it, maybe chatGPT does model a core aspect of human cognition.

Even regulators are regulated. There are laws that prescribe what the Fed can and can not do, and how.

I mean sure, you can say that. The US government is regulated too. But in general the government IS the regulator of the people just as the central bank IS the regulator of monetary policy.

You're not dealing with the geniuses. You're likely just dealing with people smarter than you. I can assure you geniuses are rare, and people of the same intelligence level tend to gather so you can go through a career completely missing them depending on where you work. There's enough noise such that among these groups you won't notice the correlation.

Tbh the geniuses don't view their own code as shitty, to them it's quality. It's only viewed as shitty externally.

Here's another controversial opinion:

It's the genius programmers who write the shittiest code. In my experience clean code tends to be a waste of time for geniuses because shitty code isn't really a problem for smarter people.

The further away you are from genius the greater the tendency for you to write cleaner code because you need it in order to deal with the complexity.

What's common among HN readers is that they think they're smart. So you may be reading this and thinking "Wait a minute, this isn't true! I'm smart and I like clean code!". Well, I hate to break it to you. The truth hurts because most likely one of those two attributes probably doesn't actually describe you.

Also as a side mention, I'm a clean code Nazi. My code is really clean.

I have great sympathy for your argument, and agree with the gist of it.

I'm not making an argument. I'm stating the current status quo of the US. No argument was ever made here about whether I think it's right or wrong.

That's not true. Many central banks have lots of regulations on them. However, they are not regulated by the kind of competition you outlined above.

It is true. The central bank is overall unregulated because the central bank IS the regulator. In the same way a government is unregulated so is the central bank. In the US the central bank is more or less the fourth branch of the government.

You're talking about "many central banks." while I'm simply talking about the Federal reserve in the US. I think you're mistaken, I'm not making a general statement about how central banks across the world works.

For one, loaning money to banks is only one part of what the Fed does. They also outright buy and sell assets (eg in open market transactions). In many instances, the banks (technically) lend money to the Fed by having positive account balances at the Fed.

This is true. However one of the primary ways they influence the money supply is through interest rates. Interest rates are also one of the triggers of the SVB bank run.

For a contrasting example on how interest rates don't need to be the focus of monetary policy, have a look at the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Instead of using interest rates as a channel to communicate and effect their monetary policy, they use the exchange rate of the Singapore dollar to a basket of foreign currencies. Crudely, instead of 'setting' the interest rate, they 'set' the exchange rate.

They don't need to be, but they ARE quite central in the US. Additionally given how the US dollar is sort of the central peg of all other currencies, the US would rather the Dollar remain the Rate at which all other currencies are set against. That way the US in a way indirectly and collectively controls the worlds monetary value.

I didn't offer any opinions in my initial reply. I'm simply stating what's going on in the US about the nature of the reserve ratio and how it doesn't matter when applied to SVB. It seems you're trying to make an argument here against one I never made?

If I get a loan from Bank A, then I use that loan to pay a person who deposits the IOU into Bank B. Bank B will go to Bank A and demand the money in cash because it's a competitor bank. If bank A has zero cash on hand they immediately hit a bank run, so basically bank A wants to keep a certain ratio at all times.

Thus through the existence of competitor banks, banks are NATURALLY incentivized to keep a reserve ratio. A reserve ratio enforced by law is not necessary in a capitalist economy with healthy competition. Competition prevents banks from going crazy with creating money out of thin air via loans. The removal of the reserve ratio by the government is relatively inconsequential.

However this natural regulation through competition is negated by the existence of an entity without competition. The central bank. The central bank functions as an entity that loans money to banks with interest. It is this interest rate that is used to regulate the money supply in the US. Low interest rates are what caused inflation and high interest rates from the central bank are what are now being used to stop inflation.

So in this case Bank A can now borrow a bunch of money from the Central Bank thereby increasing it's reserve ratio allowing it to lend more money out. In a sense, the central bank is essentially the entity where the fractional reserve ratio actually matters.

The central bank is unregulated so they can print money to loan to other banks however much they like. Thus a bank run on the central bank is impossible. The ratio in this case matters more as a metric that correlates with inflation.

I still disagree. It's just not that hard. I can explain by comparing it to art.

Artistry is hard and artistry is basically the same thing as design but harder.

Let's take something like say painting. Painting requires a lot of skill. Why? Two reasons. The sheer amount of ways to compose paint into a painting is astronomical. Much much much More then the amount of atoms in the universe. The amount of these paintings that would be considered "art" is also astronomical in number but the ratio of art to all possible paintings is minuscule in number and can basically be rounded to zero. This ratio and the actual huge numbers plugged into the ratio illustrate how hard artistry is.

How about building art or designs with legos? Suddenly it's easier. Why? Because the number of ways legos can be composed in a limited space is much smaller then the ways you can compose paint on a canvas. This is because lego Blocks have specific rules. Two lego blocks have a countable number of ways they can be composed, two brush strokes can be positioned with enough variation that composition is more or less infinite. This is why designing something in legos is EASIER than painting. In fact this is the part where the word "artistry" starts to transition to "design". In legos it can be said you are "designing" a structure. Basically when the skill involved with the creative endeavor becomes significantly easier we tend to transition from artistry to the word "design". It's not a hard rule but definitely a generality that exists.

I look at these constructs made by a "lego artist" and I know I can ALSO make those big constructs if I had the will and time to do it. It's a feat of enduring tedium and not much skill. But the mona lisa in oil paints? you need skill to render that.

Do you see where I'm going here? What's system design if not putting together lego like primitives? It's trivial. The only thing you need here is knowledge about how the primitives work and how they compose. That's really the only challenge.

Heck you can even write a program that has all possible "boxes" as primitives with the right composition rules and just brute force evolve a design through random compositions. Each design has what? at most 40 primitives in a typical design? Maybe 200 total primitives? Let's make it 10,000 total system design primitives just to be excessively generous. Even at that number, system design is easy enough that it's a candidate for genetic programming.

Do you think such a thing can be accomplished with pixels? Randomly generate a square of 1000x1000 color pixels until you get something that looks legit? Running it at 5000 generations per second you probably won't get anything legit before the sun goes super nova. You'll need to switch out of random walk to machine learning to get anything artistic.

As I mentioned before, heterosexual male teachers are not automatically viewed with moral suspicion in all-girls schools (second example: https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/03/the-perils...),

There's nuance in this you're not seeing.

Those teachers may be married and/or have daughters. A single male SHOULD be questioned.

You are applying a double standard to homosexual males that society does not apply to heterosexual males.

Again simplistic logic. A double standard does not preclude it from being true. You have to see motive. Your link isn't evidence for anything. Can you read the minds of those teachers? Do you know if anything happened behind closed doors?

By virtue of once being a young single heterosexual male with no children I know how these men think. A high school teacher at an all female school is not only fighting external forces of how he's perceived but the internal forces of his instincts. If an attractive female HS student makes a move, the temptation is real.

Typically for males, though, the consequences of such violations are a hundred times more severe then if a female did it so you tend to see female teachers violate this rule more regularly.

Male leaders tend to have daughter(s) or family in the troop thus the incentives are aligned. A single male is rarely the troop leader.

There is a reason to suspect a single heterosexual male joining a girl scout troop for the same reason you'd suspect a single male joining an all female yoga class.

There's a degree of common sense here that's being deliberately ignored. If a pedophile who's never acted out on his desires becomes a scout leader it is completely logical and wise to question his intentions as it is to question the intentions of a male girl scout leader or a gay boy scout leader.

You have to look at circumstance and evidence and nuance. You can't just build simplistic logic of "this exists and therefore the following must be completely true". No. Life is much more complex such that if your own child was part of a troop and ANY person who matches the profile of the characters described above MUST be questioned for the safety of your child.

and more success in life.

There's merit in the idea that stupidity correlates with success. Anecdotally you see the correlation among academia and celebrities. Celebrities are richer and happier then academics who are poorer but smarter. Therefore doing something that contributes to your stupidity could possibly increase your success and happiness.

What anecdotally makes you think that cognitive decline contributed individually to your success? I'm curious.

I too value my happiness and wealth over my intelligence, and I would gladly take a stupid pill if such a pill made the trade off between the two attributes.

The true death of silicon valley will come as a slow burn. Arguably the burn has already begun years ago.

This is true. Banning does work though when coupled with extreme capital punishment. See Singapore.

There is also the argument of whether usage reduction is the objective goal though.

This was attempted before by Russel & Whitehead before Godel proved that any sufficiently complicated system can produce non-truths and false statements that cannot be verified by that same system.

I never made the claim the system was complete.

If you read cybernetics texts today, they paint a picture very similar to neural networks and the statistical methods for processing data. "Introduction to Cybernetics" by W. Ross Ashby is a decent text with a lot of good exercises. I still think there's a lot to learn here.

well unfortunately I don't see anything formal in the Wikipedia. I'll take a deeper look at that text though.

Even the probabilities are somewhat bullshit. 50% confidence on intelligence?

How was that number calculated? Someone definitely pulled that number out of their ass.

I actually think the words like "unlikely" better convey the reality of the assessment. Numbers imply calculation. But no such calculation is even possible given the nature of qualitative information.

Before legalization in many states, even on HN even the suggestion that cannabis was unhealthy could get you voted down. People refused to believe it.

Now that it's legal peoples' objectives have shifted and it's now ok to talk about it. It's a literal example of the stupidity in human psychology.

People don't use logic to make conclusions about the world, they use logic to justify their conclusions so they can fulfill their objectives.

Very hard to find a person who does cannabis on a daily basis and is also fully on board with the fact that cannabis causes cognitive decline.

If you think it would be ok for a school to fire a teacher merely for being gay (as suggested by “it makes perfect sense for organizations to spend money to get rid of these people”), then you don’t support gay rights. In some instances US courts have even ruled against religious schools that have done this:

I suggested no such thing, it's just more manipulation from you. This is what I suggested: I suggested that it's extremely strange for a gay man to be teaching at an all boys school and it's highly reasonable to suspect that his intentions are unethical.

If I could read the mind of such a teacher and I can see his intentions are good, by god I will fight for that teachers right to work there. Barring that I can only make the best logical judgment given the information that I have and that judgement is either the teacher leaves or I put my kid in another school/classroom.

If you absolutely insist on making this a discussion about pedophilia (even extending your unpleasant insinuations to gay men who are boy scout leaders),

I never insisted on such a thing. I am simply clearing my name on the accusations you continue to pile on to me one after another. You accuse me of using pedophilia as some sort of deliberate inflammatory weapon, all I did was point out that I AM NOT. There is no insistence that we continue the conversation along those lines.

I want a discussion but apparently I can't have one because your attitude is combative and accusatory. It's characteristic of activists of gay people and many many activists nowadays. They use accusatory tactics of boxing people into horrible labels like "racist", "misogynistic". It's largely an effective tactic, but it's so effective that many times it's used as a mechanism to gain power and dominate others.

Activists like you don't want to engage in meaningful discussion, you just want to dominate. To achieve these goals what you do is misconstrue your opponents intention, you throw away all nuance and deliberately try to simplify your opponent and his actions so that he or she will fit into the box you want him in. When you successfully do this then you execute your main weapon of calling him "racist", "sexist" or any other horrible term that carries a history too horrible to justify using such words with such frivolity.

So what I'm doing is I have to continuously CLARIFY what I am saying. I have to reemphasize the nuance behind what I am saying so that I protect myself from being nailed onto that label. You literally attempted to do this to me earlier.

Even if a significant number of mainstream Catholics think that being gay is equivalent to being a pedophile (which I doubt), then that is still no reason for the rest of us to make such an association.

I never said the "rest of us" have to make that association. I am simply saying why it makes sense for Catholics to want to root out their leaders who engage in homosexual behavior. Personally, I don't care if a gay man is elected mayor but it makes sense to me why a catholic doesn't want a priest to be gay. I am also saying it's justified for such priests and leaders within the catholic community to be fired.

Now is a really good time to make a start up called skynet.

Paragraphs and paragraphs about pedophilia when you could just have chosen another analogy to make your point. Apologies for the late edit (which I made without having seen your comment), but I hope you can see what I'm getting at here. There has to be a better way to make your point than this.

Except if you read ANY of the paragraphs you'll see that it's relevant. Many Catholics view homosexuals in the same way they view pedophilia (with disgust) and don't want homosexuals in leadership positions. I'm sorry this analogy is apt and you know it from your other comments. Live with it.

I have no interest in 'getting you banned', by the way.

Then don't accuse me of not commenting on good faith. Don't point fingers. Accusations and attacks on someones character as if they're in violation of the rules here can get people banned.

I think perhaps we are now seeing your true point of view.

What view? That homosexuals are the same as regular human beings with ulterior motives and incentives? What? you think I should just assume that if someone is gay then he's a paragon of moral goodness? If a man who loves sushi goes to a place that exclusively sell sushi it is reasonable to assume he wants sushi. It is reasonable to question that act.

If that man went to a food court that happens to have sushi then it's reasonable to assume otherwise. But such is not the case when a gay man becomes the leader of a boy scout troop. He may have good intentions, but it is highly highly reasonable to assume he does not.

Edit: On closer reading, I am surprised to find this sentence in a comment from someone who earlier claimed to be a supporter of gay rights:

I support gay rights in the same way I support human rights. I don't give you or gay people special treatment. If a gay person commits a crime he's a criminal. Your statement here is trying to put me in a box. It's like you're saying that If someone can even just assume that a gay person could have the proclivity of doing something unethical then how could that person be a supporter of gay rights? Impossible!

Wow, what is this? You know about how many Catholics view pedophilia as equivalent to homosexuality and you had the gall to accuse me of being inflammatory in my other comment. You do have an agenda.

you consider scrolling through wikipedia a review of the formality of the field? I think you may need to consider how formal you are :)

Yeah I did. Not one math equation and two informal diagrams describing the same thing.

Most formal theories outside of programming languages use western mathematical syntax for the foundational dialect and I don't see anything related to that here. Cybernetics similar in a sense to "system design" in that it's not formal imo.

See category theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_theory for what I mean by "formal language".

And no, category theory is not even approaching explaining this. At all.

It does. It unifies all of mathematics at the lowest level and operate at all levels of abstraction and even recursively. Category theory can describe category theory. The problem is we have no definition in this theory about what is a better design? It's just a description of designs.

Even though there isn't a formal theory, there definitely is a big difference between a person capable of doing good system design and one who isn't.

Yeah? Prove it. You can't. That's the big problem here. The only thing you can give me at best is some vague metric on some anecdotal experience. We don't even have data on this. Replace "system designers" with ICs who have the same breadth of IC experience who produces the better design? What does "better" even mean?

My personal opinion on Systems design is that it's pretty easy if you got the "IC" part down. It is largely just arrows and boxes.

I've done it enough to know that I couldn't do it while keeping my IC-type role as well. For me, personally, I approach systems design in a sort of breadth first search for a solution to the entire problem space, whilst deep-diving into particular areas where I am less certain. For other parts my experience lets me brush over details quite quickly.

I think of system design as something that is tediously hard. It's not something that requires a massive amount of skill. But it does take a lot of time to come up with a design. It's like building the Eiffel tower out of toothpicks. Anyone with the relevant domain knowledge (as opposed to design knowledge) can do it. So yeah it does make sense you can't be an IC at the same time.

But realise at the same time that even software development itself doesn't have anything resembling a universal theory, common processes or frameworks. It's all changing, being reinvented, and rediscovered on a continuous basis.

This is the whole point. Anything referred to as "design" is largely an artistic endeavor. Arguably much of these frameworks have been changing in a manner that cannot be characterized as "improvement". Just endless horizontal progress and endless genetic drift because we can't know if one design is better than the other.

This is the same with system designers. The skill level is horizontally stacked because we literally can't prove shit.

It is equally true that many things even in medicine or construction aren't based on any solid science.

Medicine is a highly quantitative endeavor. All medicines go through rigorous quantitative verification for efficacy. The same is definitely not done with system designers.

Pedophilia has victims. There is no victim when two adult gay men have consensual sex – unless one of them is harassed out of his job by people spying on him.

Not necessarily. Depending on the state, it's technically pedophilia/rape when a 18 year old female has sex with a 17 year old. Let's say the 18 year old is a virgin and kind of innocent while the 17 year old is a big burly guy and has already had sex with dozens of people. In this case, many states classify 17 year old male as the one getting raped.

The technicalities here literally mask the intent. Intent is what matters here and the circumstances here make the intent less clear in such a way that the technical law can't fully articulate true justice.

But you don't need me to explain this. You are fully aware of what I mean here. When a homosexual man becomes a teacher for an all boys school something is wrong. When a homosexual man joins an organization against homosexuality something is also wrong. It makes perfect sense for organizations to spend money to get rid of these people.

The comparison with pedophilia is so obviously inappropriate (and liable to unnecessarily inflame emotions in the context of this thread) that it makes me question whether you're engaging with this topic in good faith.

I throw this right back at you, your response is not in good faith. You're trying to start something here. I think you're very intelligent and attempting to deliberately turn this conversation into a witch hunt against me.

It is also not inappropriate from many peoples perspective including the people in the article. Homosexuality from the perspective of many conservative and religious groups is Just as deviant as pedophilia. From this reasoning, it makes sense why such a group would form to weed out homosexual priests. Unfortunately, the technical wording of the catholic rules on this matter doesn't govern their intents and feelings about it, and thus they act on their feelings rather then the rules themselves.

It's not about whether the existence of these groups is right or wrong. It's whether these anti-homosexual groups exiling a homosexual who joined their group is right or wrong.

I'm sorry to say, it's right. Those people shouldn't have joined in the first place. If you're not supporting and acting for the principles of this group you shouldn't join. Bottom line. The intent of the action is right, the intent of the people joining the group IS NOT.

I also flagged your post. Despite me giving you a good faith answer, I still consider your answer as someone who is obviously trying to start a witch hunt and get me banned. You are not acting in good faith; you have an agenda and your answer is manipulatively hiding that fact. This type of behavior is a hundred times more vile and insidious then someone who is just trolling (and I'm OBVIOUSLY not).

I recommend we end the conversation here before it gets out of hand. Good day.

Edit: This sentence here was ADDED to your response AFTER I made this reply:

   "If you do have a point to make, could I ask you to please find a way to make it without reference to pedophilia, which has nothing to do with gay priests using hookup apps to talk to other adult gay men. "

I picture a naked torso with all the sensitive zones under the correct letters. Typing the right letters triggers something to happen.

easy maintenance is what I really want this for. Even the best keyboard eventually transforms into a crusty mess due to how dirty I am.

With this I can I can keep it clean.

This doesn't look formal at all.

Usually formal theories need a logical mathematical language to fully characterize it. I scanned the wikipedia of cybernetics and it's just not it.

Control theory or signals is the closest formal theory to cybernetics. The problem with this theory is that it only characterizes very specific systems that have ordinal values as inputs and outputs. What if the input is text? What if it's tuples of tree like tokens?

The closest theory that encompasses the intuition of what we think of when we use the word "systems" is category theory in my experience. And this theory is in fact sort of too general to be very useful.

Maybe I shouldn't say "Anyone can do it."

I mean more like you don't need any "design" training or specific "systems" training because no actual theory about this stuff actually exists. It's bullshit.

You did 15 years of C++ so you have domain knowledge of C++ and whatever area you work in. You don't need any extra "design" training to get good at it. So a better way to say it is this: Anyone who is knowledgeable about whatever they're working on can do "design" you don't need to hire someone who's an expert in "design."

Your title "Systems Architect" is more of a symbol of your rank and years of experience then it is your ability to design.

Being gay isn’t a sin according to Catholicism, only having gay sex.

Being a pedophile isn't against the law, only engaging on pedophiliac desires is illegal. Therefore I should be ok with pedophiles being leaders of our community and teachers. Right? Wrong.

Examining the technicalities of the rules is just pedantry. There is an obvious intent and overall meaning behind the rules.

Perhaps you can think of a justification for all this, but I haven’t seen a coherent one given so far in this thread.

Thanks for being so polite. This is obviously against the rules here, you're saying it to trigger me.

Seems like systems design is just studying a potpourri of engineering disciplines and the job entails stringing it all together the best that you can. Is there a formal theory about systems? I don't think so, and if there is, there's definitely no way to quantify if one system is "better" than another.

Since no formal theory about the field exists.. every conjecture is just opinion. So someone working in systems design won't necessarily come up with a better "design" then some other person who doesn't specifically work in the field given that there's a lack of a formal theory to prove it either way. In software these guys who do "designs" are the system architects and I think the ridicule is justified given that anyone can do it.

Category theory is the closest thing I've seen to a fundamental theory of design and I'm positive it's not well known among "systems design" engineers. Honestly it's not even that useful either because the theory doesn't include any measurement to determine if one structure is "better" than another.